Honeyfield's Heavy Duty Feeder – Fat Ball & Nugget

Honeyfield's Heavy Duty Feeder – Fat Ball & Nugget

The Honeyfield's Heavy Duty Dual Purpose Feeder takes either fat balls or suet nuggets, which between them cover most of the high-energy feeding a garden does over winter. It is a powder-coated steel cage with a lift-off lid and an angled quick-release base, so it empties and refills without a fight.

Fat pulls in a wider crowd than seed does. Expect starlings, house sparrows, the whole tit family and greenfinches on the cage, and in many gardens a great spotted woodpecker as well. Robins and dunnocks will not cling to it but will work the ground underneath.

Performance & Benefits

• Takes both fat balls and suet nuggets or pellets, so one feeder covers both.
• Powder-coated steel throughout, built to stay out all year.
• Angled quick-release base — the feature that makes it properly cleanable rather than just refillable.
• Lift-off lid for filling from the top.
• Cage format lets small birds cling and feed while keeping the fat in one piece.

Suitable For

• Starlings, house sparrows, and blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits.
• Greenfinches, and great spotted woodpeckers, which take to a cage feeder readily.
• Year-round feeding — fat is as useful in the breeding season as in January.
• Gardens where a hanging tube feeder gets emptied by starlings in a morning.
• Fat balls and suet nuggets only. Whole peanuts need a proper mesh peanut feeder, not this cage.

How to Use

• Take fat balls out of their nets before loading them. The net goes in the bin, not the feeder.
• Lift the lid, drop the balls or nuggets in, and close it.
• Release the angled base to tip out crumbs and old fat rather than letting them cake in the bottom.
• Wash every two weeks in hot water with washing-up liquid or a feeder cleaner, and dry before refilling.
• Hang it where droppings will not fall onto a seed feeder or a bird table below.

Specification

• Powder-coated steel lid and body.
• Angled quick-release base.
• Dual purpose: fat balls or suet nuggets and pellets.
• Honeyfield's product pages are unavailable at the time of writing and they publish no dimensions or capacity we could verify, so none are stated here.

Care & Caution

• Never put a fat ball into this or any feeder with its net still on. Nets catch birds by the feet and the beak, and a trapped bird rarely gets free.
• Soft fat products go rancid in hot weather and can turn greasy enough to foul plumage. Put out less in summer and clear anything left standing.
• Clean the feeder fortnightly. A fat feeder sits at the centre of a busy, close-contact crowd and is a genuine route for disease between birds.