The Finches Friend

A guest post from Martin Hughes-Games - Brand Ambassador for Finches Friend

“Another bird feeder” I thought, “how can it be any different from all the others”? But then I looked more carefully (prompted in part by my friend Chris Packham) and I realised that this bird feeder, the Finches Friend Cleaner Feeder, really was different, incorporating as it did, a brilliant innovation to help our garden birds.

Let me wind back the clock for a moment. Between 2006 and 2015, according to the British trust for Ornithology (BTO), the green finch population in the UK has fallen by a shocking 60%.  This decline is largely caused by a disease, the unpronounceable Trichomonosis, a sort of parasite which is often spread when birds come to eat at our garden feeders. The chaffinch population has declined for the same reason. The disease also affects many other birds including house sparrows, siskin and bullfinches.  The BTO is currently researching the ongoing decline in the goldfinch population. It’s too early to say for certain but it’s probable that Trichomonosis is responsible for this too. It’s obviously crucial we try to keep our bird feeders clean because the disease is passed on through contaminated food or drinking water – contaminated by an infected bird.

But we all know the problem:  It’s quite a business dismantling and washing conventional garden feeders, meaning so many of us, me included, do not wash our feeders as often as we should. This is exactly the problem the new feeder sets out to address. I was amazed to discover the designer of the Finches Friend was not a professional birder. Dick Woods actually runs a successful industrial business, and it was those industrial design skills that enabled him to come up with a totally new sort of feeder. The Finches Friend Cleaner Feeder allows the user to effortlessly remove the feeding station (where the birds perch and therefore where disease would be passed on) whilst leaving the rest of the feeder undisturbed. The feeding station can then be cleaned in minutes and replaced. In fact, the Finches Friend Cleaner Feeder even comes with an extra feeding station that can be slipped into place as soon as the first one is removed. It’s a brilliant piece of design which makes cleaning your feeder infinitely more simple.

Why did an industrial engineer and businessman spend time and energy designing a bird feeder?! Simple, Dick has a genuine passion for his garden birds which I picked up on the very first time I spoke to him. He saw the shocking decline of finches in his own garden and rather than sit there wringing his hands, determined to do something about it. The Finches Friend is the result of a huge amount of time and effort, but the result brilliantly overcomes one of the key problems of feeding our garden birds. We all want to help our feathered friends, but we may have been inadvertently spreading a killer disease amongst them. The finches friend addresses this problem head on with a brilliant solution. 

Martin Hughes-Games. - Naturalist & Broadcaster