Reader Divy found this picture while looking for bird feeders on Amazon. What’s wrong with the photo advertising this product? It’s a “Bird Feeder Hanging Classic Tube Hanging Feeders with 6 Feeding Ports Premium Hard Plastic with Steel Hanger Weatherproof and Water Resistant Great for Attracting Birds Outdoors Garden”? I can think of at least three errors.
Click on photo to go to the ad.
Divy also found this ad, and noted: “No bird is going to stay put while a predator is about to pounce on it, two inches away!”
It is a constant battle to keep birds out of the squirrel feeder.
I assume copy/pasting pictures of birds resized to fit is not an error, nor is the likelihood that the birds are from different geographical distributions, nor that some are truly wild and others are bred in captivity, or that they forgot to put a squirrel hanging upside down inhaling seed from the empty lowest port (true story – they always do it), …
🐾🐾
Would the hummer go for seeds?
One must use special hummingbird feeders – they have a sugar liquid in them. It isn’t just a gimmick, like I thought when I saw them.
… oh, right – forgot – hummingbirds don’t go to that feeder!
The hummingbird looked the odd one out to me, though the budgie also looks out of place (but would at least eat seeds).
Why is the photo of the bird feeder so out of focus?
Our cat is a little smarter when looking out the window at the birds getting baths in the fountain. She stays down low and still so the birds don’t even see her. They are so crazy for the water they don’t see anything else.
The tit or chickadee is an insectivore from boreal regions and would not be attracted by those seeds, the Australian parakeet is the only granivore in the image but this one is not a wild specimen -hence unlikely to get to the feeders in your garden, the hummingbird feeds on nectar (and on some insects and spiders), and the scissored-tailed tyranid is a flycatcher.
Chickadees come to feeders all the time. They love shelled peanuts and sunflower seeds.
They’ll eat seeds out of our hands a5 the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario.
I’m glad to be on a different continent to that plastic-tube-piercing hummingbird.
I suspect there are several errors of scaling between the various dinosaurs. At least none of them have obvious flesh-eating adaptations, though whether they’re seed-eaters (obligate or opportunistic) is more of a question. And which continents they are native to is an even harder question.
When the local corvids get to know about that feeder, they’re going to be queueing up to drive the resident cat … I think the technical term is “stark staring bonkers”.
“Form a disorderly queue!”
Regarding the titmouse and the black cat, I put up almost the same window feeder every winter, but filled with peanuts in the shell. We call it “Cat TV,” and I have seen blue jays ignore our big cat just as close to the window–until the cat pounces, smacking the window, and the jay flies off with one (or two!) whole peanuts.
I think smaller birds might be intimidated by the cat, but maybe not. I think many of them have a sense of security or understanding about the window. I get small birds on my windowsills all the time, and the cats go nuts but the birds just sit there.
Bigger birds would not be bothered. We have a roadrunner that lives around here that regularly comes up onto the front porch and teases the cats through the storm door when the solid door is open.
L
The Roadrunner keeps your cats fed on a regular diet of Wylie E. Coyote documentary videos to remind them of their place in the pecking order?
The magpies here delight in tapping at the window to scramble our indoor cats. Ditto the Scrub jays. “Bugging cats. It’s What We Do.”
There’s all the stuff about them being mostly the wrong type of birds for the food in the feeder, although the only one I figured out for myself is the hummingbird. The parrotty looking one seems a bit out of scale compared to the others.
The real problems:
1. No string hanging the feeder up
2. No squirrels
3. No ducks
4. No cats
Good call
To their credit, there were no blue jays or hawks… well, hawks eating seeds or even squirrels. The hawk usually goes in a tree to enjoy squirrel. True story.
I got rid of my feeder partly for that reason.
I think the fact that the feeder appears to be just one tube with holes at different points means that the feed would be pouring out of all the holes continually. The hole facing the camera seems to show that this isn’t the case, but I don’t see any way it can’t be, and suspect that is photoshopped.
Yes, I thought so too one time, but they actually do not do that with appropriately sized seeds when I actually got one and tried it.
I was wondering about that, but was not sure how these feeders are.
Look into one of the feeding holes facing you (well, the camera). There is a dark insert over the upper half of the penetration through the clear plastic tube, so that there would be a small patch of “free surface” of the seeds exposed to the pecking beak.
On a larger scale, granular solids act as fluids, but at this scale, the granularity is having it’s say.
1. Parakeet (they do eat seeds, though). 2. Hummingbird (hahahahahaha!). 3. Is that a swallow? (long tail, forked?, tiny weak feet). Seeds aren’t a liquid, DrBrydon.
In fairness, some birds are braver than others: https://www.dropbox.com/s/iqbdge9niw1hka2/Video%20Dec%2025%2C%2010%2000%2053%20AM.mov?dl=0
(Hope that video link works!)
the tail thrashing by the beautiful turquoise velvet scratching post (there is a similar scratching post in my house)
All my furniture is scratching posts.
Some of your scratching posts you consider “furniture”. The cat(s) tolerate your oddities as long as the food keeps coming.
This reminds me of those strange, funny and ubiquitous Chinese translations into English. “Come-on-in, Welcome store”, “to open box, open” and everyone knows about the translated instruction manuals; except in this case, instead of words, it’s a picture-version of bad translation. That hummingbird made me LOL!
The wire hanger would be slid down all the way to the hooks on the end.
No hummingbird at this feeder, certainly…
The feet should be clutching onto the bars.
I don’t think any bird would sit on perch directly below another bird
… a second time.
(I must clean the dinosaur dielectric off the car.)