Last updated on April 29th, 2022 at 01:44 am
It can be incredibly frustrating to set out suet for the birds just for it to be eaten by mammals during the night. Figuring out what’s eating your suet and preventing it is key to providing the food your birds need.
The best way to find out what’s eating your suet at night is to set up a motion-activated wildlife camera. However, you can also look at animal tracks, claw marks, and scat to figure out what’s eating your suet. The most common culprits are flying squirrels and raccoons.
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Animals That Eat Suet at Night
Many animals may eat suet at night given the opportunity, but two of the most common culprits are raccoons and flying squirrels.
You’ll want to prevent this from happening, not only so you have some left for the birds, but also for the health of these creatures.
Let’s look at what these animals like and how to stop them from eating the suet.
Raccoons
Raccoons are omnivores and scavengers, so they’ll eat just about anything left out at night.
They’re known to dig through the garbage looking for food, and they live in areas inhabited by humans.
Raccoons will gladly eat suet if it’s left out at night, as they’re excellent climbers with small hands that can easily reach into a suet cage.
Flying Squirrels
Flying squirrels are opportunistic omnivores that primarily eat seeds, fruit, nuts, fungi, and insects.
However, they will go after any available food, especially in areas with humans.
Flying squirrels will happily go after suet, especially when it has plenty of seeds and nuts pressed into it.
They may also go for other bird feeders and seeds if available.
How To Find Out What’s Eating Your Suet
The best way to find out what’s eating your suet is to set up a motion-activated wildlife camera.
However, you can also figure out what’s eating your suet by looking at the mess that’s leftover for signs of different creatures.
Wildlife Cameras
The most foolproof way to figure out what’s eating your suet is to set up a motion-activated wildlife camera like the Xtellar Trail Camera from Amazon.com.
This camera uses a passive infrared (PIR) sensor triggered by a movement to capture animals.
Its battery lasts as long as six months without a charge when in standby mode.
Tips for Setting Up a Wildlife Camera
Follow these tips when setting up your wildlife camera:
- Pick a good location. The camera should face the feeder, but it should also not face a direction where it could be triggered by irrelevant activity like your own movements.
- Charge the batteries before setting up. If you forget this step, you could be disappointed to find that you have no footage of your nighttime visitors in the morning.
- Choose your favorite way to mount the camera. Some options are using bungee cords or premade mounts from the hardware store.
- Configure all the settings. Each camera has unique settings, but most allow you to set up the trigger speed, trigger frequency, flash, and timer.
- Test your camera. Activate it yourself by walking in front of it at night, and you’ll be able to check your footage to see if it’s capturing the quality and accuracy of footage that you’re looking for.
Other Evidence
Another way to figure out what’s eating your suet is to look for scat, pawprints, or other evidence of animals near your feeder.
It helps to know what animals you’re looking for, and in this case, you can bet that what’s eating your suet is probably a raccoon or a squirrel.
Because of that, you can simply look at the size of these pieces of evidence to determine which it is.
How To Stop Animals From Eating Your Suet at Night
Whether the animals eating your suet are raccoons, squirrels, or something else, you can protect your suet from being eaten at night by putting it away.
Or, you can use a baffle such as the Mekkapro Squirrel Baffle (available on Amazon.com).
Squirrel baffles prevent animals from climbing up pole-mounted feeders or down-hanging feeders.
You can install a squirrel baffle on a pole feeder by wrapping the baffle around the pole above a hanging feeder or below a pole-mounted feeder.
That way, you can leave your suet out at night without worrying that there’ll be none left for the birds in the morning.
You can also try protecting your suet by placing netting over it. This will keep animals from reaching into the suet cage to access the food.
Remember to never intentionally feed wildlife.
Leaving out alternate food for raccoons and squirrels may seem wise.
However, in the end, it’ll just attract them to your yard and make it more likely that they’ll go after the suet.
More Tips for Setting Up a Suet Feeder
In addition to keeping squirrels, raccoons, and other mammals out of your feeder, there are several things you can do to have more success with your suet feeder.
Consider these tips:
- Use upside-down feeders instead of an open-cage feeder. This will make it difficult for birds or other animals to eat too much suet at once. Otherwise, birds like starlings and grackles can eat all of the suet, leaving none for the rest of the birds.
- Use a small cage and place the suet deep inside it. That way, you’ll be able to keep large bully birds and mammals away from the food while keeping it accessible to small birds.
- Use no-melt suet during the summer months. Some kinds of suet can get drippy and melted in the summer months, so look for one that’s marketed as usable during the hot times of the year if you want to feed suet to birds during that season.
- Avoid corn, wheat, and milo. These filler products are not nutritious. A better first ingredient would be beef fat, followed by nuts.
- Have patience waiting for birds to find your feeder. They may not recognize the suet feeder as a food source right away, but after time, the birds will figure it out and come to the suet feeder regularly.
