You need feeders with a cage around them so that the pigeons learn that the only place they can find food is on the ground below the feeders ... not the feeders themselves.
I haven't found that at all. The acer near the feeder has come into leaf so I'm thinking that may have confused the little birds a bit. The cheekier ones are returning. They never seem concerned about the pigeons pottering about underneath.
We have loose seed on the ground and on a bird table plus fat blocks and balls and a peanut feeder hanging above. The wood pigeons and collared doves don't bother the smaller birds at all and they don't try for the hanging feeders either tho the collared doves like the bird table.
The only birds that cause problems for the rest are the magpies who tend to swoop in late afternoon and scatter the rest but they soon come back.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
Well well, they have just decided that people in towns don't need to have gas guzzling SUVS. The oft called Chelsea tractor, contributes a disproportionate amount of pollution. I could have told them that years ago, just as I always knew that Diesel was a filthy fuel ( 20 years of commuting by motorcycle). Why did it take them this long to work this out? 😡
Well well, they have just decided that people in towns don't need to have gas guzzling SUVS. The oft called Chelsea tractor, contributes a disproportionate amount of pollution. I could have told them that years ago, just as I always knew that Diesel was a filthy fuel ( 20 years of commuting by motorcycle). Why did it take them this long to work this out? 😡
It is a bit more nuanced than that. I knew someone with a company car of which he had a limited choice. He had a young family, went on camping holidays and needed a car with luggage room. It came down to an estate or suv. He was leaning towards the estate for pollution reasons until he actually looked into the emissions of both cars. The SUV was less polluting by a significant amount. He still got the anti pollution fake car parking tickets from greenpeace in the private company carpark (trespass to put it there).
I agree there's many reasons to cut back on SUV sales and use but blanket characterisation of one vehicle class as bad without facts is possibly wrong too.
Another example are the very early take up of hybrid technologies in lexus SUVs. They were often less polluting than their size would indicate. Not saying they were OK to own because I feel there is a big issue with vehicle size increasing with each new car generation. SUVs are leading the way with that.
Don't forget people are bigger too now. Just imagine trying to fit the mythical average family of 4 today in a 60s mini or an old A40? We're taller and often broader and rounder now and we all have so much more stuff to carry.
We lost a Zafira after a lorry pranged it and bought a smaller 5 door car but if we want to take the dogs out with us we have to put a back seat down and it certainly doesn't have the capacity for carrying fence posts and big bags of compost about and even the weekly shop can be a squeeze in its boot.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
I have an 07 toyota Avensis, with the back seats down we got a double bed mattress in the back when our daughter was moving out. It's a 1.8 petrol engine and it still passes the London ULEZ emissions if I was ever mad enough to want to drive in central London . The estate version is even more capacious. The point being made was you don't need a 2 ton four wheel drive in the city. 4wd is known to be inefficient even in smaller cars. It's known that these big SUVs are often bought more for status than practical reasons though I accept there will be exceptions. A big factor is manufacturers can sell them at a premium price and make more profit on them, because of their perceived status.
I'm still not sure how we used to manage going on holiday as kids. I remember some trips in my dad's old saloon with three kids in the back and the dog, sailing boat strapped to the roof, outboard motor in the boot along with a week's worth of stuff, mudflaps scraping the ground and a box full of cassettes to keep us entertained. These days you can't go anywhere for more than one night without a roof box.
After we had the second kid though I sold my lovely Alfa Romeo and bought a Peugeot Teepee. It sounds like I'm trying to make myself feel better but it's the best car I've ever owned. It's got a roof rack inside, you can remove all the back seats to turn it into a van and the boot is at knee height so it's easy to load stuff in there, the back doors slide rather than swing open, the kids have fold down tables in the back and best of all there's no fancy electrics to go wrong.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
The thing is a lot of SUV owners who live in the city may only use them for the school run and supermarket trip most of the time ... to get to work they may well use public transport ... but they need the larger car to take the family to visit friends and relatives, trips to the coast or country parks and weekend breaks and holidays in the countryside. Given the environmental cost of manufacturing cars, it would be even more environmentally unsound to have two vehicles rather than one.
And you do need a bigger car with more oomph for motorway journeys. I used to have a small ‘city car’ ... the dangerous tailgating and intimidatory driving I experienced on motorways from drivers of lorries and more powerful cars was in some cases quite scary. I now have a bigger car with more ooomph and definitely more ‘presence’, and I don’t experience that type of bullying by other drivers any more ... the same driving style and the same driver, except I’m now older and with white hair instead of strawberry-blonde ... choosing the right car isn’t as simple as some folk make it sound. 🤔
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
We went on holidays to Devon in the 1970's in a Mini, two adults and two kids and all our gear for two weeks, how on earth we managed that I will never know!
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The only birds that cause problems for the rest are the magpies who tend to swoop in late afternoon and scatter the rest but they soon come back.
I agree there's many reasons to cut back on SUV sales and use but blanket characterisation of one vehicle class as bad without facts is possibly wrong too.
Another example are the very early take up of hybrid technologies in lexus SUVs. They were often less polluting than their size would indicate. Not saying they were OK to own because I feel there is a big issue with vehicle size increasing with each new car generation. SUVs are leading the way with that.
We lost a Zafira after a lorry pranged it and bought a smaller 5 door car but if we want to take the dogs out with us we have to put a back seat down and it certainly doesn't have the capacity for carrying fence posts and big bags of compost about and even the weekly shop can be a squeeze in its boot.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.