Oriole Feeder Hack...

We've been actively feeding our orioles (Bullock's and Hooded, in roughly equal numbers) for several years now.  This year we have more than ever, the children, we're guessing, of several generations of local orioles that have learned where they can get some easy, tasty chow.

The feeders we use are designed to be hung, so we've been hanging them from the same hangers we use for our hummingbird feeders.  In general, we're very happy with these feeders – the orioles like them, plus they have a clever little “bee guard” that's very effective at keeping the bees out while letting the orioles in.  But the feeders have one attribute we don't like: if you wiggle them in the slightest, the liquid food sloshes right out the holes.  The orioles, being fairly large birds, shake the heck out of the feeders when they land and take off.  We've had puddles of oriole food (sugar water, basically) collected under the feeders.  Our suspicion is that more food spills than is eaten.

So this weekend I embarked on a hack of the oriole feeders – and so far, at least, it seems to have worked very well!  The photo above right shows the hack: a 7/8" dowel poking up into a hole in the bottom of the feeder.  This hole was already there, though it wasn't 7/8" in diameter – it was somewhere between 3/4" and 7/8".  I don't think these holes were intended as a mounting mechanism; I think they're there to strengthen the bottom piece of plastic.  I noticed that the holes had three vertical ridges of plastic in them, just 1/32" or so high.  I ground them down with a Dremel tool, and voila! – a 7/8" dowel then fit very nicely.

To make the “L”-shaped dowels, I cut each dowel at 45°, then glued the two pieces to make a 90° angle.  I used a fast-curing epoxy glue, and clamped them overnight.  The clamping was a bit tricky, but I used a simple trick: I nailed a finishing nail into the angled end of each dowel (if you look closely at the photo above, you can see the nail hole just above the bottom).  Then I used a small bar clamp to hold the pieces together – the nails kept the clamp from slipping.  Then all I had left to do was to drill level holes in the post, to hold the dowels – this was made easy by a convenient level built right into my drill.  A little glue, and I was done. 

We've already seen that the rate of oriole food consumption has gone down, while the rate of oriole visits has not.  Success!

While I was taking the photo above, I was joined by a fearless female hummingbird, drinking from a hummingbird feeder just below the oriole feeder I was photographing.  Also, a very frustrated bug landed on the oriole feeder and tried very hard to get in the feeding hole.  It failed completely :-)  As always, click to enlarge any of the photos...