I have lost more feeders to grey squirrels than I care to admit. A joiner by trade, so I kept thinking the answer was a better bit of kit. It was not.

The honest version is this: there is no such thing as a squirrel-proof bird feeder. There are feeders that make life difficult, and there is a position that makes life impossible. The second one matters far more, and it is free.

Let me save you the money I wasted.

Why most squirrel-proof feeders fail

Walk into any garden centre and you will find a wall of feeders with "squirrel-proof" on the label. Most of them are a plastic tube with a plastic cage round it.

Here is what happens. The squirrel cannot get through the cage, so it sits on top and chews the lid. Or it hangs off the outside and shakes the whole thing until the seed rains down. Then it eats off the ground at its leisure.

Plastic is the problem. A grey squirrel's incisors grow continuously and it needs to wear them down on something. Your feeder is that something.

If a feeder is plastic and it is reachable, you are on a countdown. The only question is how many weeks.

The two designs that genuinely hold up

Weight-activated feeders

These have a sprung outer shroud. A blue tit weighs about 11 grams and nothing happens. A grey squirrel weighs 500 grams or so, the shroud drops under the weight, and the feeding ports close.

They work. They are also the most expensive option, and the mechanism can gum up with damp seed if you never clean it. Buy one with a metal shroud rather than plastic and take it apart every couple of weeks.

Steel cage feeders

Simpler, cheaper, and my preference. A steel cage with gaps of around four centimetres lets blue tits, great tits, goldfinches and sparrows through and stops anything bigger, squirrels included.

The gap size is the whole trick. Much larger and starlings squeeze in. Much smaller and you start excluding greenfinches and great tits, which rather defeats the point.

Our caged fat ball feeders work on this principle, and they are the cheapest sensible first step if squirrels are currently winning. Steel, so nothing to chew, and the cage does the excluding.

The thing that actually works: two metres of nothing

A grey squirrel can jump about two metres horizontally from a standing start. Downwards, from a branch onto a feeder, it will manage rather more, and it does not much mind the landing.

So the rule is simple. Two metres of clear air in every direction, and more than that below anything overhanging.

That usually rules out the fence. It rules out the shed roof. It very often rules out the tree you were planning to hang it in, because the trunk is a motorway and the branches are slip roads.

What it leaves is open lawn, which is what a shepherd hook pole is for. Push it in to a third of its length, stand back, and look at what is within two metres. If the answer is nothing, you have already beaten most feeders on the market.

Baffles: the best value in the whole category

A baffle is a dome or a cone on the pole below the feeder. The squirrel climbs, meets a smooth sloping surface it cannot get purchase on, and slides off.

They cost a fraction of a weight-activated feeder and, on a smooth metal pole in an open position, they are close to unbeatable. The failure mode is almost always the same: the baffle is mounted too low, so the squirrel jumps over it from the ground. Get it at least 1.2 metres up.

We do not stock baffles yet, and I would rather say so than sell you something else instead. Any decent garden centre has them, and the full pest-proofing guide covers how to fit one properly.

What about the food itself?

You can make the menu less appealing. Squirrels do not like capsaicin and birds cannot taste it at all, so chilli-treated seed genuinely works. It is not a magic bullet, but as one layer among several it earns its place.

What matters more is the spill. A feeder that scatters seed feeds squirrels on the ground and invites rats along too. A catcher tray stops most of it, and husk-free sunflower hearts leave nothing to drop in the first place.

So what would I actually buy?

If you are starting from nothing and squirrels are the problem, in this order:

  • A pole, sited in open lawn, two metres clear of everything.
  • A baffle on the pole, at least 1.2 metres up.
  • A steel feeder — caged if you want to exclude starlings too.
  • A tray underneath to stop the spill that feeds them anyway.

That is a better setup than the most expensive weight-activated feeder hung from a fence, and it costs less.

A word for the squirrels

They are not villains. They are hungry animals doing exactly what they evolved to do, and they are very good at it.

Excluding them from the feeder is fair enough. Trapping or harming them is not, and in the case of grey squirrels there are legal complications around release too. Make the feeder difficult, accept that you will lose the occasional round, and keep the scoreboard on the fridge.

Mine currently reads squirrels 11, me 9. I am told this is progress.