Pigeons eating all my bird food

[batmanladybird]

What can I do about this?
Can I put out something specifically for them so they don't go on my feeder that I want for Mr Robin and all the blue tits that come calling.

Watching with interest. The pigeons kind of “dry hump” our feeders to shake the food onto the ground, then scoff it all!

If you put food in hanging feeders the pigeons can't access it. I do this and also put food on bird tables for birds that can't hang from feeders. I love feeding the pigeons (wood pigeons).

Pigeons are birds? They’re probably hungry. I don’t see the point of feeding the birds but then specifying that you only want certain types of birds to eat it.

You have to invest in the hardware that physically prevents them from getting to it. We have feeders in cages and a sort of cage for ground feeders that keeps out pigeons and magpies. The buggers will just scoff everything otherwise.

Following as we have started getting parakeets and blue tits which is lovely but the pigeons and magpies keep scaring them off

@TonTonMacoute do you have a link please? I’m struggling to visualise what you mean

@Judystilldreamsofhorses cross posted sorry, I wasn't contradicting you. I've seen magpies doing that to feeders but never pigeons! Maybe because I put a lot of stuff on various bird tables they don't need to.

Robins and pigeons like to eat off the ground but eat different food to each other.
Tits cope well with dangly feeders which pigeons don't. You need a mix of foodstuffs and a range of flat vs dangly vs cages to get a variety of birds.
Peanuts in a hanging cage or lard with tiny seeds in a dangly coconut shell are good for tits and finches.
An apple chopped in half will entertain a robin )as will fine crumbs dropped by the other birds).
The pigeons will eat any old stuff as they are essentially rats with wings: kitchen scraps, bread etc: put it on a wide table or on the ground but clear it up before dark to discourage vermin. Give the pigeons a different area to the small birds.

You could make a sign that says -

‘No Pigeons’

The pigeons don't seem to be able to do anything with the hanging tube seed feeder. The fatballs are in a caged feeder but that's more to exclude jackdaws.

I put a bit of seed on the mesh tray attachment on our pole feeder, that gets eaten by the woodpigeons or squirrel.

We like a pigeon . DS has names for the 3 that frequent our garden.
Same for squirrels.
Hanging feeders are harder for the pigeons, so we put food on the bird table (he can just squeeze in) especially.

If you're going to buy hanging feeders don't buy cheap ones like I did for our toddler because the pigeons will just crack them open

For the cage, something like this (ours is nowhere near as posh, I think it's an old freezer basket or something).

We also have a couple of squirrel proof feeders which work for pigeons as well.

Are you like this with Foodbanks?

Don’t want any Northerners getting their hands on your donated crisps? Or maybe you take an exception to Southerners helping themselves to your baked beans?

It’s rather horrid to discriminate against the poor ol pigeons who want to eat just as much as the next bird.

@Magistera

Pigeons are birds? They’re probably hungry. I don’t see the point of feeding the birds but then specifying that you only want certain types of birds to eat it.

It’s bird snobbery. They don’t want to look out into the garden and see pigeon riff raff. Only Robins and smartly feathered Blue Tits are allowed.

I suspect if a seagull flies in, out comes the air rifle ...

The same thing happened in our garden. The greedy bastardspigeons used to sit on the roof of our house (about 30 of them) them swoop down and scoff everything in sight. My husband then lowered the roof of the bird table so that the pigeons can't get into it. That solved that, but now the squirrels get up onto the bird table (so I have to feed them too )

It's more that I don't want the pigeons to scare the other birds off

@BleuJay

You could make a sign that says -

‘No Pigeons’

Might try this Thanks

Pigeons don't scare the other birds off but the Magpies and the Jackdaws do in my garden.

Have one area for them and another area for the little birds?

We have a problem with starlings. CJ wildlife is your friend.

We have this: www.birdfood.co.uk/large-feeder-guardian-cage
and this: www.birdfood.co.uk/waterford-peanut-butter-feeder-with-guard - we just put seed in the jar once the initial suet had all gone

In fact, just follow this link to see the various options: www.birdfood.co.uk/catalogsearch/result/?q=Guard

You have my sympathy - our issue is squirrels, which are cute, but can eat an awful lot of bird food. They took a couple of our feeders apart (specifically the hanging ones which we'd got so the small birds got a chance....)

Poor pigeons.

We had a long running battle with a pair of squirrels. In the end I just enjoyed watching their ingenuity.

A pigeon managed to remove our anti pigeon spikes from the top of the swing (to stop them pooing over the swing, there were plenty of other perches available, we don't discriminate!)

You could try a Off My Nuts Squirrel Spinner - it's a battery powered top that you hang your feeder off. If it detects anything heavier than a robin it will start spinning to dislodge the unwelcome visitors. It works on magpies and jackdaws so I guess wood pigeons will trigger it as well.

We have a couple of these. They work by closing the portal access to heavier animals, so squirrels, rats and heavier birds cannot get at the food in them. We use sunflower hearts in ours, so many birds love them and they can get them without having to waste energy getting the seed husk off.

As a win-win, our little birds pull the seeds out, split them in half and drop one bit and swallow the other. So there are bits on the ground underneath that other birds, like the woodpigeons, can pick up. To be fair you do want that as any food left on the ground will attract rats, so the woodpigeons are doing us a favour in a way.

We get dunnocks, robins, goldfinches, greenfinches and house sparrows regularly to ours, with blue, great and long-tailed tits as additional visitors. They're lovely.

I was just coming to say get a Squirrel Buster but TheNoodlesIncident beat me to it! Brilliant, has saved me a fortune in sunflower hearts. I rather suspect we've offset the feeder cost already. The 'normal' size one is actually huge. You need to be able to hang it from something like a full size Gardman multiple feeder pole or a high branch.

Now we have the squirrels vacuuming the bits up off the ground instead - unfortunately for them, they get distracted and don't notice the cats... who don't take prisoners.