Sunday, December 23, 2007
DESIGN FAULT - FEEDERS
There is a design fault in some bird feeders - the 'stand alone' metal ones with 'shepherd's crook' type hooks for the feeders. There have been reports in a birding magazine - and to me personally - of fatalities where a bird has got it's tiny leg stuck in the central piece. My son found a dead greenfinch on his return after a day out and has put some blue tack into the gap. If anyone has one of these maybe the central piece could be taped up. A neighbour has a similar feeder but the central bit has a finial to close any gap there may be. There have been two reports in Bird Watching of similar deaths.
5 comments:
Mmmmm, this is a bit of a flaw. I have a less serious but irritating problem with feeders from CJ - they fall to bits. As they are quite expensive I'm less than pleased about their frailty.
Alastair
Which of the feeders is it that fall to bits ? I have the "Defender" type metal ones and they seem very well made to me, but mine are only a week old so have not had any wear and tear yet. I have to phone CJ after Xmas about a trade order for my shop and I can raise this with their sales team if you wish ?
The problem is with the piece of metal that goes through the green metal bar and through the lid and then acts as the hanging piece. The end pieces that are angled are too short on some feeders we've had making the feeder difficult to fill and it often just falls off the tree, feeder stand. The design problem is also to do with the green metal bar which if the above metal piece has short angled sections is ineffective (because it is open at one end). I've replaced the two pieces with wire on a metal Niger feeder and a peanut feeder. We gave up altogether with a large seed feeder, the above bits were just inadequate for the size of the feeder, it continually fell of the tree, breaking the (expensive plastic catch trays (also CJ). I'm not impressed. I have some photos somewhere of the offending bits, I'll post on the web if you like.
Hi Alastair
Mine all seem very study with none of the problems you mention. Maybe yours were an earlier design now replaced ? Send me some photos to my email address at paulinvc&blueyonder.co.uk and I will forward them to Paul Sears one of the sales people who I deal with for his comments and hopefully some replacements as yours are not up to scratch.
Paul,
Thanks. One I purchased later, if I recall, was a bit of an improvement. But even that is irritating to fill, fell off when I moved it today for example. I will hunt out the pix.
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