Constantly fussing with the feeder (1 Viewer)

Does anyone else find themselves constantly fussing with and trying to improve the feeder? Here is my oddball setup. It's the only good place where we can see it well inside other than putting it on the back deck and inside the cat enclosure , which I would never do.

The birds love it in the bushes of course but so do squirrels. The cone and moving the suet to the top on that boom are recent changes. But the other boom holding the nyjer feeder broke today so tomorrow I need to get it all down to fix that.

Notice that the green feeder, a squirrel proof one where the lid levers down if a squirrel gets on, has a mangled halo to reduce house sparrow infestation. The halo keeps the house sparrows reduced but the squirrel has figured out how to hang from the halo to get at the seed. If not one thing or another.

So tomorrow is mess with the feeder day again... I wonder what others changes I'll make....

I have no idea how to stop the attached photo from going horizontal. Strange...

Yes, until recently, I went through quite a few iterations of "foil the varmits".

My current setup is a bit complicated, but seems to be doing an excellent job with pest reduction:

The feeders are attached to a "stack" of arms from the Wild Birds Unlimited 1" pole system. This "stack" is attached to a 2' length of 2" PVC with a pair of very large worm clamps (like you'd use on a car; these large ones are designed for patching up large-diameter PVC pipe.) The 2' length of PVC, in turn, slides up and down a 12' Purple Martin pole. The pole has a large tubular raccoon/squirrel baffle about 5' above the ground. (The baffle had to be special-ordered, as the in-stock baffles at WBU won't fit a 2" diameter pole.)

After two months, I'm pretty convinced this setup works; the only pest that can access it is flying squirrels, and they are both very cute and very small, so I don't mind them so much.

The height of the pole allows me to see the feeders from my living room; I'm on a crawl space and a shorter setup would not be tall enough. My previous setup was a deck-mounted pole stack, but it wasn't tall enough to install a rodent baffle. The raccoons figured out the could shake the contents out of the squirrel-proof seed feeder, and the squirrels decided they didn't mind the taste of hot-pepper suet so much.