If you’ve tried to feed birds in your back yard, you may have encountered that strangest of creatures, the squirrel bird. Feeder hanging nicely in your yard, you’ve probably seen these wingless and featherless creatures perching on your feeder, happily eating from it while scaring all the other birds away.
While researching the feeding habits of the squirrel bird, I discovered something absolutely shocking: the squirrel, while it certainly enjoys the bird feeder, is not a bird at all! It’s just a small annoying animal that steals the food out of your bird feeder!
You can imagine just how offended I was that my bird feeder wasn’t feeding birds. I certainly didn’t hang it out there for anything that wasn’t a bird, and for the squirrels to come down and eat from it anyway… well, frankly, it was just presumptuous and rude.
I tried hanging signs on the feeder, but it seems that squirrels don’t bother reading – because “no squirrels allowed” didn’t work, and neither did “for actual birds only.”
I thought maybe they just didn’t speak English, so I got a friend to write one in Spanish, and when that didn’t work I got another friend to write one in French. It still didn’t work, and then someone told me squirrels can’t read. So I tried a picture of a squirrel that had a red circle with a line through it, but that didn’t work either.
It wouldn’t really bother me so much if the squirrels and the birds would both use the feeder, but the squirrels also frighten the birds away. They won’t eat there with a squirrel. Bird feeder etiquette is simply not a squirrel’s strong suit.
Imagine how happy I was to find that there was, in fact, a solution to my problem! The Yankee Flipper bird feeder was built by some very smart people who already knew a squirrel was not a bird, and because it’s not a bird it doesn’t have to fly. Things that don’t fly are heavier than things that do, so the perch on the Yankee Flipper is spring-loaded.
When something that doesn’t fly tries to climb on the Yankee Flipper bird feeder, it activates the spring-loaded switch, which turns on a little motor and spins the perch.
And those squirrels learn how to fly real quick! They get hurled off the feeder and drop right down into the yard. It’s great fun to watch, and it doesn’t take the squirrels long to figure out that it’s a waste of time to climb on the feeder.
Once the squirrels learn to leave the feeder alone, you can relax in your yard and just watch the birds as they come and eat happily from their squirrel-proof feeder. The squirrels go on about their business finding food elsewhere, and the birds are left alone.
So if you’ve found yourself watching a squirrel bird feeder in your backyard, where no other birds come to feed at all, take a look at the Yankee Flipper – because there’s no such thing as a squirrel bird!