Seed & Suet Cylinders

Cylinders are concentrated blocks of bird food – they may be made of suet, seeds, nuts, or a combination of ingredients. Typically, you'll want to offer cylinders in one of our specialty feeders. They are an excellent complement to a standard seed feeder and have many unique virtues:

Attract More Birds

A variety of high quality ingredients means a variety of birds. Use a cylinder with lots of sunflower to attract seed-eating birds like finches, use one with nuts to attract nut-eaters like chickadees, titmice, and woodpeckers, or use a suet cylinder to attract both nut-eaters and insect-eating species like bushtits, kinglets, and Townsend's warblers.

Avoid Creature Problems

Our most popular cylinder flavors are our Hot Pepper Suet and Hot Pepper Seed & Nut varieties. These spicy options deter most taste-sensitive mammals like squirrels, raccoons, and rodents, making them one of the easiest options for feeding birds with the critters – no special hardware or precise placement required, just put them out there and enjoy the birds! And even non-pepper versions are much cleaner than typical loose seeds. Many options have no shells and are 100% edible, and all cylinders will avoid the common problem of loose seed where birds take one seed and toss aside a few others to get to it. This keeps the ground clean of rodent-attracting refuse. You can see more ways to feed birds without the mess in our No Mess Birdfeeding article.

Easy to Clean, Fill, and Store

Our most popular feeders are simple black pins on which you drop the cylinder, as shown in the first two pictures below. With these minimalist feeders, birds cling directly to the food and there are few feeder surfaces to keep clean, making maintenance very easy. (We also have a variety of more decorative feeders with domes, trays, or perches.) And with the dense, stuck-together nature of cylinders, each small block may last for weeks before a refill is needed, depending on your abundance and varieties of birds. Even storage is easier than traditional birdfeeding, since each cylinder is so dense and long-lasting compared to lugging around 20 lbs. bags of seed.

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