The safe feeding of small birds is a big issue

OVER the past weeks, I have been writing a lot about feeding wild birds. This is your fault, because, every time these articles appear, I get a stack of emails from readers who are obviously interested in the subject.

A Cork reader recently bought her first house, and, immediately afterwards, her first bird table. Her problem: “The crows are landing on it in droves and frightening off the little birds.”

This is common and not easy to solve. One solution is to surround the bird table with chicken wire, with a mesh large enough to let the little birds through, but not the larger ones. This works, but it doesn’t look great and may cause problems when you want to renew the food.