Earl's Last Oriole Feeders
“Everybody puts their feeders away in June. That’s the exact week the orioles bring their young to the table.”
Why an 84-year-old Wisconsin cabinetmaker is releasing his last hand-built oriole feeders at a special price — before he closes his shop for good.
A male Baltimore oriole at one of Earl Sorenson’s feeders in Coon Valley. In July, the adults arrive with the young they raised that spring.
By the second week of June, most oriole feeders in America are already in a garage — rinsed out, boxed up, put away for the year. The people who hung them in May waited three weeks, saw nothing, and decided the orioles must have gone somewhere else. They were closer than they will ever know.
Because the orioles did not leave. In July they are still here — and they have brought company. The pair that slipped through in May has fledged a brood, and now the whole family is working the trees, teaching the young where to eat before a journey that will take them three thousand miles south. It is the loudest, most visible stretch of the entire oriole year. And it lands in the exact weeks when almost every backyard has quietly taken the table away.
The feeders that are still out are mostly failing anyway. In July heat, an orange half dries to leather by afternoon and grape jelly ferments in an open cup before the day is done. A hungry fledgling arrives, finds a soured, ant-covered dish, and moves on. Multiply that by a neighborhood, and you get the thing so many people describe without understanding it: a summer that went quiet.
The most spectacular bird in the yard is the one nobody feeds
Walk down any street in the eastern half of the country and count the bird feeders. Nearly all of them are full of seed — sunflower, millet, a suet cake for the woodpeckers. That feeds the cardinals, the chickadees, the finches. It is a good and generous thing. It also completely skips the oriole, because an oriole will not touch a seed as long as it lives. Orioles eat fruit, nectar, insects, and above all orange halves and grape jelly. A seed feeder is, to an oriole, an empty table with a tablecloth on it.
So the single most striking bird that passes through the American backyard — a bird the color of a live coal — is routinely missed by the very people who love birds enough to feed them. And it is the one that can least afford to be missed.
What the record actually shows
- Baltimore oriole numbers are down roughly 36% since 1966, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey — a steady decline for two human generations.
- The losses trace to vanishing nesting and tropical wintering habitat, and to pesticides sprayed on the very shade trees where orioles nest and hunt.
- Audubon’s climate modeling projects the Baltimore oriole could lose 18% of its summer range on the current warming path — with hotter, drier summers among the pressures.
- They cross the Gulf of Mexico to get here. A bird can arrive after a thousand miles of open water to a yard with nothing it can use.
None of that is a reason to feel helpless. It is a reason to put out the one table this particular bird is looking for — and to do it in the weeks it matters most. Which is not April. It is right now.
A male Baltimore oriole in full song. The most spectacular bird to pass through the backyard — and the one almost no feeder is built for.
The man in the coulee who never stopped watching
Earl Sorenson has watched Baltimore orioles come up the Mississippi valley for fifty springs. His place sits in the Driftless country of southwestern Wisconsin — the steep, wooded coulees the glaciers missed, sugar maples and old apple trees, the big river a few ridges to the west. It is one of the great oriole highways in North America, and Earl’s yard is the address the birds have chosen for as long as his neighbors can remember.
He was a cabinetmaker by trade — fifty years at the bench, furniture and stairs and built-ins for half the county. The machine shed behind his house became his workshop the day he retired, and it still smells of sawdust and orange shellac. On the bench this July: a row of feeders in various stages, the same orange he has mixed by eye for decades.
Earl in the shed behind his house, shaping a feeder from bare wood. He has built them the same way, on the same bench, for over thirty years.
“People swear the orioles left their town,” he says, without looking up from the roof he is fitting. “They didn’t. The feeder just told them to keep flying.” He sets the piece down. “An oriole hunts by color. It is looking for orange from up in the canopy, the way it looks for a ripe fruit. Hang out something gray, or something that faded to gray by the second week of sun, and you have hung out nothing. The bird flies right over it.”
That, he says, is the part almost everyone gets wrong. Not the yard. Not the food. The feeder.
Five ways a cheap feeder sends the orioles somewhere else
Earl has taken apart more failed store-bought feeders than he can count — neighbors bring them over the way people bring a sick plant to someone with a garden. He has come to file the failures into five.
Dull plastic that bleaches to gray in a few weeks — the orioles never see it, so the owner decides there simply are none.
An orange half in open July sun dries to leather by afternoon — a feast at breakfast, a shriveled rind by lunch.
Uncovered jelly ferments and draws a moving carpet of ants and wasps — and a soured cup keeps the birds off the whole feeder.
Dishes that won’t lift out never get cleaned, so the grime builds all season — and that’s how sickness moves bird to bird.
Tucked under an awning or set too low, it’s a feeder orioles can’t find, won’t trust — and a cat can reach.
What Earl built instead
The feeder Earl makes is not clever. It is correct — every part of it aimed at one of those five failures. He talks about it the way he talks about a joint that will hold for a century: plainly, and with numbers.
Detail 01
The Orange That Calls Them In
The body is finished in a true oriole orange, the fruit-signal the bird is built to hunt for — bright enough to read from the treetops. It is not decoration. It is the lure. “The color is doing half the work before a bird ever lands,” Earl says.
Detail 02
The Dry-Larder Roof
A pitched wooden roof shades the orange and the jelly and keeps the rain off. In July that is the whole game: shaded fruit stays juicy hours longer, and covered jelly ferments far slower. The roof is why the food is still worth landing on at four in the afternoon.
Detail 03
The Full Table
A center spike for a fresh orange half, two jelly cups, and dishes for mealworms and cut fruit — the entire oriole diet at one station. It is built for a family: adults and this year’s young can all feed at once, which is precisely the July scene most feeders can’t hold.
Detail 04
The Lift-Out Cups
The jelly cups pull straight out and rinse clean in seconds. Earl designed the cleaning in on purpose, because he knows the feeder that can’t be cleaned is the feeder that never is — and that is where trouble starts.
Detail 05
The Open-Sky Hang
It hangs from a chain out in the open, up off the ground where an oriole scanning from above will actually find it — and where cats and raccoons won’t. High enough to be seen, close enough to a window to be watched.
Detail 06
The Solid-Wood Body
Real wood, not the thin plastic that warps and fades by midsummer. It holds its color and its shape through a full season in the sun — the difference between a feeder the birds find every July and one they lose by the Fourth.
Grape jelly and a fresh orange, kept in the shade. The roof is why the food is still worth landing on by afternoon.
Fifty springs, and the same coal catching fire
Ask Earl why he still does it and he goes quiet for a moment. “First warm morning in May, that first male drops into the yard like a coal that caught fire,” he says. “Fifty years and it still stops me where I stand.” He remembers the first oriole that ever landed on a feeder he had built with his own hands — he sat down on the shed step and didn’t get up for a while. Last summer his grandson, seven, saw his first oriole from Earl’s kitchen window and asked, in a whisper, if it was real.
Adults and a first-year bird at one feeder. The full table is built for exactly this July crowd.
Why this is the last batch
Earl is 84, and the fine work is going out of his hands. The arthritis took the small cuts first — the tight joinery, the parts that have to be right to a thirty-second of an inch. “I can still build them,” he says. “I just can’t promise another season of it.” He says it the way he says everything, without complaint, the way a man talks about weather he can’t change.
What he will miss is smaller than the workshop and larger than it: the smell of orange shellac on a cool morning, the quiet hour at the bench before the yard wakes up, the first oriole of the day landing on something he made. There is no one to hand the tools to. When the bench is empty, that is the end of it.
What is left is what is on the bench: 52 finished feeders. The last he expects to make.
The last batch on the bench. When these are gone, Earl isn’t building more.
He priced them low on purpose
Here is the part his daughter had to talk him through. The feeders are priced well under what fifty years of skill are worth — and Earl wanted it that way. “I could ask three times this,” he says. “But I don’t want them sitting in a collector’s case. I want them full of orioles.”
The money was never the point. What he wants, before he is done, is more orange in more yards — more families who get to see a coal catch fire on a July morning, more first-year birds that leave this valley fat and ready instead of hungry, more seven-year-olds asking if it’s real. Whoever takes one of these last feeders is carrying a piece of that forward. His daughter Kirsten set up the page and ships them out from the farm.
The oriole orange goes on by hand, one feeder at a time. It was never about the money.
What people say after the first summer
“Twenty years I’ve tried to get orioles and gave up thinking we just didn’t have them. Hung this in July, had a pair with two young ones on it within four days. I actually called my sister.”
“The roof is the whole difference. My old feeder’s jelly turned to soup and ants by noon. On this one the food actually lasts the day, and the cups rinse out in seconds.”
“It’s beautifully made — solid wood, not the flimsy plastic thing I had before. But the best part was my grandkids watching a whole oriole family from the kitchen. Worth ten times what I paid.”
Before you decide
Only through this page. Earl’s feeders aren’t sold on Amazon, in stores, or anywhere else — his daughter ships each one directly from the farm.
This is the final batch — 52 feeders on the bench, and Earl isn’t building more. When they’re gone, that’s the end of it.
There’s a 30-day return, no questions asked — just an email. Hang it, give the orioles a week or two to find it, and see for yourself.