In the soft loam of much of the midwest, it can be hard to keep birdfeeders upright. Especially when squirrels attack. You put 18 inches of pole in the ground, following the instructions in the birdfeeder manual, and it falls over. You put it in a 50-pound ball of concrete, and it stays upright until a couple of young squirrels attack. And a 50-pound ball of concrete suddenly becomes a great annoyance when you wish to remove your birdfeeder, either temporarily or permanently. We need a better solution.
Here is an attempt to combat this problem with a bit of extra leverage.
I purchased several pieces of galvanized steel pipe and attachments for each stand (total cost about $12-15 per stand):
- 1 2-foot narrow (1 inch or so) section with threaded ends
- 1 18-inch to 2-foot wider (just wide enough for the birdfeeder pole to slip inside) section with threaded ends
- 1 end cap sized for the narrow section, or some sort of bung that fits snugly inside the end of the narrow section.
- 1 adapter to connect the narrow section to the wider section
- 1 flush floor cap that mates with the wider section
- 1 female-to-female coupling that mates with the wider section (or something else that can be used as a sacrificial part so that the threads on the top end of the pipe are not damaged while using a sledgehammer to pound the entire assembly into the ground -- A thick block of wood might work fine)
- some thin wood scrap or other similar material
I then assembled, from top to bottom: the sacrificial coupling, the wider section, the adaptor, the narrower section, and the end cap. I torqued them together quite tightly with monkey wrenches, except for the sacrificial part, which needs to go on a bit more than finger-tight but needs to come off when the whole unit has been hammered most of the way into the ground, so make it loose enough to remove.
Using a level to repeatedly check and correct vertical alignment, I used a sledgehammer to insert this contraption into the ground. I discovered that the sledgehammer blows must be exactly straight on, or the threads will still be damaged. (I managed to recover with the help of a file, but you don't want to do that; it is time-consuming.)
When the contraption was about 6 inches out of the ground, I removed the sacrificial part, replaced it with the flush mount, and carefully (to avoid damaging the flush mount) hammered it the rest of the way, until the flush mount was almost flush with the ground. You probably want to leave it sticking half an inch or so out so that it doesn't get buried and disappear; one of the points of the flushmount is to keep the contraption visible when you pull the birdfeeder out for cleaning or replacement later.
One other reason to include the flush mount is that you can use it to pull the contraption back out of the ground when you get tired of it; without that, it could really be quite difficult and involve a lot of digging.
This contraption provides more leverage than just dropping the pole into the ground because of the 2-foot narrow section sticking a total of 3.5-4 feet down into the ground, and has more purchase because the top section is wider and has to move more dirt to fall over.
At this point, you can set the birdfeeder in the contraption. Note that it will go in only as far as the wider section is deep. (If it plunges 3.5-4 feet into the ground, your pipe sections are far too wide.)
The birdfeeder will likely be a bit loose, and will probably spin in the wind and under squirrel attack so that you won't always be able to see the birds. To counteract this, use thin wedges of wood scrap or other material to keep the birdfeeder from turning. Alternatively, you can put a screw in the birdfeeder pole and wire it to one of the screwholes in the flushmount. Be careful in doing this not to weaken the pole, of course. You could also wrap a piece of rubber or neoprene around the pole, wrap wire around that rubber or neoprene, and then tie the wire off through one of the screwholes. Or something else.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are several thousand more words on this topic (click on any image for a larger version):
