Gardener Urges People to Paint Their Bird Feeder Poles White — This Wards off Squirrels Instantly

Your feeder is abundant with food, awaiting flocks of bird guests. While birds come and go, there’s a creature that lurks unflinchingly in the background, like a surveillance camera, prying on the feeder from behind the bushes. Hello, squirrel! One loose end and it will snag the opportunity, pouncing right at your feeder and hoarding up on the food that was not its own.

Watching the squirrel, some bigger birds will resist and try to dominate. But most of them will just feel powerless against its aggressive acrobatics and flit away without food. With an unshrinking terror, the squirrel will keep on filching the bird food, while the chirpy feathered friends will remain sullen, hungry, in exile. When Connie Thompson and her husband Pat found themselves tussling with an invasive squirrel, they used an unusual trick to shoo it away from their bird feeder.

Writing in The Sault Times, Thompson, a resident of the Dafter township in Chippewa County of Michigan, shared that the discovery of this trick goes way back to an instance when she had just set up a bird feeder in their backyard. The wire globe-shaped feeder was dangling in their yard. The next day, when Pat walked to the yard, he noticed that the top of the feeder had dropped to the ground. The following day, he noticed the top lying down again. And the next day and the next day and so on. The mystery continued. “We watched, and watched, but were never able to see any bird or other creature even approach the top,” she recalled.

Then one day, the mystery cracked. Pat caught a black squirrel leaping from the surrounding grove of pine trees and pouncing upon the feeder to grab the bird seeds. While the feeder swung violently from its weight, it spilled the seeds and loosened the feeder’s top panel, which dropped to the ground. The squirrel slipped inside the seed container and grabbed black-oil seed, causing a sloppy spill around and scampering away into the woods.

Thompson is not the only birder to have encountered this terror-inducing intrusion of squirrels on their feeders. Birdkeepers use different techniques to scare off these bushy-tailed rodents. From sprinkling chilli peppers to tucking a slinky toy, and smothering the feeder with Vaseline, there are all kinds of bizarre and offbeat tactics. But Thompsons employed a rather unusual method. They coated their bird feeder pole in white paint. “If you hang your bird feeders from hooks on 4x4 posts, paint the pole white,” she explained in the article. The white paint trick, she claimed, was working. She couldn’t figure out the science behind it, though.

“The squirrels will occasionally hop up onto the post, but immediately jump off. They often stare longingly up at the bird feeders hanging on the post, but do not attempt to climb the pole,” Thompson shared. Pat's theory was that the squirrel felt hesitant to climb the white-painted pole because the color would cause it to become too exposed to the predators prowling nearby. While generally, birds don’t like the feeder if it’s painted white, in Thompson’s case, it proved to be advantageous. The white color threatened its camouflage, so the squirrel had no choice but to retreat from the feeder.