Tom's Hand-Built Bird Feeder — The Maker's Journal

The Maker’s Journal — Birds & Backyard Wildlife Sponsored
Section: Birds & Backyard Wildlife  ·  Published 2 days ago  ·  10 min read

“I spent thirty-four years nursing sick songbirds back to health. Most of them came from someone’s backyard feeder.”

Why a 69-year-old songbird-rescue founder near Magee Marsh, Ohio is giving away his last hand-built feeders at a special price — before he closes the rescue for good.

Tom Cavanaugh beside his barn at golden hour, one of his roofed feeders on a post with a chickadee and a cardinal feeding

Tom Cavanaugh outside the old barn that housed Marsh Song Bird Rescue for thirty-four years. “People think a feeder is a kindness,” he says. “It can be. It can also be the worst thing in the yard.”

The house finch on Tom Cavanaugh’s exam table weighed less than a slice of bread and could not lift its head. It was a common backyard bird, the kind that turns up at every feeder in Ohio, and it was sick with something Tom had seen a thousand times in thirty-four years of wildlife rehab. Not a hawk. Not a window. A feeder — a well-loved one, kept full all summer by someone who adored birds.

“That’s the part that’s hard to tell people,” Tom says. “The bird didn’t get sick in spite of the feeder. It got sick because of it.”

Here is the uncomfortable thing almost no one at the garden center will tell you: the single most common way a backyard bird gets sick is at a feeder. Not from the seed you buy. From what the feeder does to that seed once it’s sitting out in the weather. Rain gets in. Seed swells and molds. Suet melts and turns in the heat. Droppings collect in a flat tray, mix with a little standing water, and within days you have grown a thin film of something no bird should ever eat.

A neglected bronze pedestal bowl feeder with soaked, moldy seed in a gray drizzly backyard, no birds around it

The single most common way a backyard bird gets sick: an open feeder, seed left to soak and mold, and not a bird in sight.

The birds can tell. A songbird will land, take one look, and leave a fouled feeder alone — which is why so many yards go quiet and their owners never understand why. And the birds that don’t leave, the young and the desperate, are the ones that end up on a table like Tom’s.

What a wet, dirty feeder actually does
  • Moldy seed grows the spores behind aspergillosis — a fungal lung infection a small bird rarely survives.
  • Standing water and droppings in a flat tray spread salmonella and other diseases from bird to bird.
  • Melted, rancid suet in summer heat is a spoiled meal, not a good one.
  • Birds avoid it — a feeder they don’t trust is a feeder they abandon, and the yard falls silent.
  • It’s the season that fools you — summer damp and heat are as dangerous as winter wet. A bad feeder is a bad feeder all year.

None of this is the owner’s fault. They did the kind thing. They hung a feeder to help. The problem was never the person. It was the feeder — and the fact that almost every one on the shelf is built to fail this exact way.

The man who can tell you precisely how it fails spent three decades holding the results in his hands.

Five ways a cheap feeder turns on the birds it’s meant to help

Walk the bird aisle of any big-box store and you’ll see them: bright plastic tubes, flat open trays, thin little cages stamped out by the thousand. They look cheerful. Tom will tell you most of them are built wrong in the same five ways — and every one of them ends the same place.

“The Petri Dish”
(open top, no roof, seed exposed to rain)
Leave seed open to the sky and the first hard rain soaks it through. Two warm days later it’s growing mold, and mold is where aspergillosis comes from. A bird breathes the spores off the seed and carries a lung infection home. The open feeder doesn’t feed a flock. It seeds one with sickness.
“The Rancid Cage”
(exposed suet, no cover)
Suet is fat, and fat spoils. Hang it uncovered and a July sun melts it soft and turns it rancid; a cold rain soaks it and grows it fuzzy. Either way the block that was supposed to be a rich meal becomes one a bird is better off skipping. “Wet suet is worse than no suet,” Tom says. “At least an empty cage doesn’t make anybody ill.”
“The Standing-Water Tray”
(flat base, no drainage)
A flat tray with no way to shed water is a shallow pond of rain, hulls, and droppings. That warm soup is exactly how a feeder-borne outbreak jumps from one bird to the next — it’s why wildlife agencies periodically ask people to take their feeders down and scrub them. A tray that can’t drain can’t stay clean.
“The Never-Cleaned Trap”
(sealed or fiddly, impossible to take apart)
Every expert says the same thing: clean your feeder often. Almost no one does — because most feeders are glued, riveted, or so awkward that scrubbing them is a two-hour job with a bottle brush. So the grime just builds, week after week, all season. A feeder you can’t clean is a feeder that’s never clean.
“The Ground Bath”
(too low, no shelter, spilled onto wet earth)
Set food low with no cover and it ends up on damp ground, mixed with mud and whatever walked through it, in easy reach of the neighborhood cat. Birds know an exposed spot when they see one, and they won’t linger to eat where they don’t feel safe. Height and shelter aren’t decoration. They’re the difference between a feeder birds use and one they pass over.

Tom knew all five failures cold before he ever picked up a saw. He’d been treating their consequences, one bird at a time, for most of his adult life.

One of Tom's finished feeders on a weathered fence: pitched roof, clear glass sides showing the seed, a green suet cage, and a thick wooden tray

His answer to all five: a roof that keeps the food dry, glass sides you can read at a glance, caged suet up out of the wet, and a tray that drains and pulls clean.

The man on the biggest bird highway in America

For thirty-four years, Tom Cavanaugh ran Marsh Song Bird Rescue out of a converted barn near Oak Harbor, Ohio, on the edge of Magee Marsh — a strip of Lake Erie shoreline that birders call the Warbler Capital of the World. Every May, close to a million migrating songbirds funnel through that marsh on their way north. Some don’t make the crossing in one piece. For three decades, those were the birds that came to Tom.

He was a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, not a hobbyist. He learned bird anatomy the hard way, with a bird in his hand. He kept the records. And year after year, the same quiet pattern kept surfacing in them: a sick songbird, a worried owner, and a feeder in the backyard doing exactly the wrong thing.

Tom fitting a clear glass side panel into the frame of an empty feeder he is building, sawdust and hand tools around him, soft window light

In Nora’s old woodshop at the back of the barn. “She built the first one for the education program,” Tom says. “I never stopped.”

The feeders started with his wife. Nora Cavanaugh was a cabinetmaker — the kind of woman who measured twice and swore once — and when the rescue needed a safe feeder to show schoolchildren how it should be done, she built one in her shop at the back of the barn. A little pitched roof to keep the food dry. A cage that held the suet up in the air. A tray you could pull and rinse in ten seconds.

“The first summer we had it up, we didn’t get a single sick bird off our own property,” Tom says. “That was the whole argument, right there.”

Nora passed four winters ago. Tom kept building the feeders in her shop, on her bench, to her standard — because by then he’d seen the difference too many times to stop.

What thirty-four years of sick birds builds into a feeder

Everything Tom learned on the exam table is built into the feeder. Not as features on a box — as answers to the five ways the cheap ones fail.

The Dry-Larder Roof
The pitched wooden roof is the whole game. It keeps rain, snow, and hard sun off the food every month of the year — so seed never soaks and molds, and suet never melts or turns. “Keep the food dry and you’ve solved eighty percent of it before a bird ever lands,” Tom says. It’s the one thing almost no cheap feeder has, and the one thing that matters most.
The Lifted Suet Cage
The suet hangs in a cage up in the airflow beneath the roof, not slumped in a wet tray. Air moves around it, water runs off it, and it stays firm and fresh instead of going soft in July or fuzzy in a cold rain. Clinging birds — chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, titmice — grip the cage and feed the way they do on a tree trunk.
The Draining Catch-Tray
The tray below catches every falling crumb so nothing’s wasted — and, just as important, it sheds water instead of holding it. No shallow pond of hulls and droppings stewing in the sun. It’s built so the one thing that spreads disease bird-to-bird simply can’t pool up in the first place. Cardinals and juncos use it as a perch to feed.
Tom fitting the green wire suet cage onto the front of a feeder he is building, roof and clear glass sides already in place, sawdust on the workbench

Every one is built by hand, one at a time: here the suet cage goes onto the front, the glass sides and roof already set.

The Take-It-Apart Clean
Every wildlife agency in the country tells people to clean their feeders. Tom built one you actually can. The tray pulls, the parts come apart, and a rinse takes a minute, not an afternoon — so it gets done, which is the only reason cleaning matters at all. It’s the hygiene standard he ran the rescue by, put into wood.
The Safe-Wood Body
Solid, untreated wood — no pressure-treatment, no sealant, no coat to off-gas or leach into food a bird eats every single day. It’s warm to a bird’s feet where bare metal is punishing in the cold, and heavy enough to sit steady in the wind instead of spinning on a wire. A feeder that holds still is a feeder birds trust.
The Right-Height Mount
The bracket sets the feeder up on a wall, fence, or post — off the wet ground, out of the cat’s reach, and up where a bird feels safe enough to stay and feed. It also puts it right where you want it: framed in the kitchen window, close enough to watch the whole thing come alive.

The morning the yard came back

Ask Tom what a good feeder actually does, and he won’t give you a number. He’ll tell you about a phone call.

“A woman called the rescue — older, lived alone, said her yard had gone dead quiet and she missed the birds like she missed people. I gave her one of Nora’s feeders and told her where to hang it and how to keep it clean.” Tom stops, and for the first time the exactness leaves his voice. “She called back in the spring. She said she’d started eating her breakfast at the window again. Said it was the best company she’d had in two years.”

A chickadee, a northern cardinal and a white-breasted nuthatch on a weathered fence rail in a real suburban backyard, a hanging feeder behind them

What Tom is working to bring back: a yard loud with birds again.

People think they’re buying a bird feeder. What they actually want is a full window on a slow morning. That’s the thing I’m really selling.

That’s what he’s working for. Not a product. A yard that comes back to life — and stays healthy while it does it.

Why these are the last he’ll build

There’s a reason the shelf of finished feeders in Nora’s shop is the last one. Tom is 69, and this is the year he’s closing Marsh Song Bird Rescue — giving up the license, emptying the flight cages, letting the old barn go quiet after thirty-four years.

Tom hanging up his canvas work apron at the end of the day, two shelves of finished wooden feeders lined up beside him

Tom with the last shelf. “Sixty-six left,” he says. “When they’re gone, the bench goes quiet. There’s nobody behind me.”

“The rescue was my whole life, and it’s time,” he says, without a trace of self-pity. “My hands can still do the fine work — fitting the roof, setting the cage true. I just won’t promise you another year of it. And I’m not going to sell a feeder I can’t build to Nora’s standard.”

There is no apprentice. His daughter lives two states away and runs a business of her own. When the shop closes, the feeders stop — for good. What’s left is what’s stacked along the wall of Nora’s shop: 66 finished feeders, the last he expects to make.

“I’m not trying to sell you a feeder”

He prices them low on purpose, and he’ll tell you exactly why.

“A cabinetmaker’s feeder, built by hand out of solid wood — somebody’ll tell you that’s an eighty-dollar object. Maybe it is. But an eighty-dollar feeder sits in a catalog. I’m not trying to sell you a feeder. I’m trying to get the dangerous one off your porch.”

What he wants is specific, and none of it is about him. He wants the wet, moldy feeders down and in the trash where they belong. He wants the food in people’s yards kept dry and clean, so the next sick finch never lands on anybody’s exam table. He wants the yards that went quiet to fill back up. Every feeder he sells cheap is one more that actually gets used instead of admired.

Thirty-four years rescuing birds, and the fix was never in my clinic. It was a roof. I just want them out there doing the job before I’m done.

One of Tom's feeders on a post in a green backyard, busy with a cardinal, a nuthatch on the suet cage, and a chickadee on the tray

A yard that fills back up: dry food under a roof, a clean tray, and birds that stay. “That’s the whole idea,” Tom says.

While the last of Tom’s feeders remain
See What’s Left
Check availability →

What people are saying about Tom’s feeders

★★★★★
“Our old feeder was a plastic tube that turned into a moldy mess every time it rained. Within a week of hanging Tom’s, the chickadees were back and the yard actually sounds like something again. The roof makes all the difference.”
Diane K. — Sandusky, Ohio
★★★★★
“I’d had two winters of sick, puffed-up finches at my old feeder and didn’t know why. Switched to this one because the tray pulls right out to clean. Haven’t had a sick bird since, and I feel good about what’s hanging out there now.”
Robert M. — Fort Wayne, Indiana
★★★★★
“You feel the weight of it the moment you pick it up — real wood, not the flimsy thing that warped on us in one season. Suet stays dry under that little roof even in a downpour. It came with a note from Tom. We hung it the same afternoon.”
Carol & Jim P. — Traverse City, Michigan

Before you decide

Where can I get one of Tom’s feeders?
Only here, through this page. They aren’t sold on Amazon, not on Temu, and not in stores — Tom builds them by hand in one workshop, and his daughter ships them out directly.
How many are left?
Tom finished 66, and that’s the last batch he expects to build before the rescue closes. Once the shelf is empty, there are no more. The page shows the current count when you check.
What if it doesn’t work out?
Every feeder is covered by a 30-day return. If you’re not happy with it for any reason, email the team at info@marlowmarketco.com and they’ll make it right — no risk to you. U.S. shipping is free.
The last batch from Nora’s bench
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Limited quantity — 66 remaining