Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: K447
Do I see another bird directly above number 50? Up above the inverted bottle...
Yes! I missed that one. Total now is 51. Thank you.

The bottles are up there to serve as ant traps. When necessary, I fill them with water. Incredibly, ants have scaled the wall of the house, walked across the brackets holding the awning, along the awning rail to find the wire holding the feeder, down the wire into the bottle (when it is empty) and up the inside wall of the bottle, down the bottle to the wire, and on to the feeder. Absolutely amazing.

tanstaafl.


My mother had similar ant traps - she spiked them with dish detergent though. That made them much slower to evaporate, and the ants couldn't float across the moat.

It was a fun few years taking care of them. Do you have any territorially aggressive ones? We'd get one now and again that would try to chase the rest off. Too many feeders, so ultimately a futile effort...

-jk