We had an outbreak here a year of so back and was heart rending to see the greenfinches unable to eat and desperately trying to.
We wash our feeder regularly now.
My wife insisted we that stopped feeding birds because or cat was leaving too many half-eaten corpses under our bed. He appears to prefer the top half.
She’s both house-proud and an animal lover - but I’m not sure which prompted the proscription.
I have never fed birds out of worry that the cats would climb any structure including tree branches to get at them which they often did and I had to get the ladders out. Birds will always find something eat especially in the countryside where there is grain about in barns or in cattle feed and in towns, dustbin bags pecked open for morsels.
We wire netted (plastic covered) round our bird table to stop our two cats attacking the birds. 100% effective
Same here, a few years ago. I got advice to clean everything carefully. I haven’t seen a greenfinch for a while now. But we do have lots of chaffinches,
Not when covered with 1 metre of snow.
I think it comes naturally to many of us… to chuck out something for the birds when times are hard for 'em.
It’s useful to have these warnings though… 
Not always. I stopped years ago, when we attracted a Merlin to our bird table. We were just providing him with an easy meal every day. Also, I have always been concerned that birds do not cluster in the same way if left to their own devices - it’s not natural and just increases the likelihood of passing on illnesses. Watch birds clearing seeds from a mown field - there can be thousands of them, but they leave space round each other - that cannot happen on a bird table or a hanging fat ball.
Due to the disease concern I’ve just rearranged our various hanging feeders so they are now over grass, not over a deck as they have been for years. We never put feed down on the ground but there is inevitably lots of dropped seed & bits of fatball that end up on the deck/now on the grass. The bigger birds like to forage there for the crumbs, but once the feeders run out even the small ones drop down to find what they dropped.
We’re surrounded by fields of monoculture, mainly maize for the local dairy cattle, that is treated with pesticides. By feeding the local bird population we hope to address the balance a bit, although we don’t feed them in the summer.
We are fortunate. We have two hectares which have been bio for the 18 years we have been here. We’ve planted a mass of hedges and shrubs and trees with berries and we have rewilded a great chunk of our field - just mown paths through - so thistles etc are rampant. We have MASSES of goldfinches.
We rarely see snow now so it’s easy for our birds to fend for themselves and there is a lot of water around in ditches and our soggy field.
sounds wonderful
I have a field full of stuff birds like planted over the last quarter of a century and left to get on with it, plus for delighting tiny children (and all of us), a tall thin metal pole with several dangling baskets for fat balls, I put it near to a laurel whose branches are much too thin to bear a cat but make very good hiding places for small birds.
My birds all cooperate and have a queuing system like planes landing at Heathrow. If there is congestion they queue in a stack above the tree on the grass with the sloping bird dish and hanging wax ball and take their turn landing one by one out of the stack.
Recently a gang of voyou pigeons tried to fly in and grab all the food in one beak strike for a couple of weeks. When I see them incoming I do my hawk cry and those come much less now leaving it back to the little birds - who know as soon as they hear the hawk cry, thst the pigeon(s) are being scared off so they come in and land.
Ok we need a recording of you doing the hawk cry now!
Similar here in the Dordogne - blue and great tits in abundance queuing for the feeders with the daily visit from a pair of greater spotted woodpeckers . We have a couple of flocks of sparrows, one lot that go for the spillage from the feeder in the cherry tree, one that go for spillage from the one hung from the edge of the abris - with one or two that have learned to go for the fat balls in the hangers,
A few nuthaches that use both plus a flock of finches, chaffinches, greenies, goldies and lately joined by a hawfinch that congregate in the pear tree nearest the house and join the sparrows at both feeding sites.
We also have a solitary hawfinch who graces our feeding areas. They’re too big to use the hanging seed feeders (though they try), so forage on the ground underneath. They used to like the table below, but that’s gone now…
Our favourite moment is when a squadron of long tailed tits arrives - so tiny! We call them Badger tits due to their facial similarities to my namesake.
Thanks for your message. Much appreciated. First hawfinch I’ve seen “in the wild”. Now only need the golden oriole to complete all the birds I wanted to see on getting “The Observers Book of British Birds” as a 7th birthday present…in 1962!
Had to look up a Hawfinch, what a beauty, never seen one in real life. Shall keep eyes peeled (disgusting expression).
I have a question for you experts! We’ve been putting out fat balls for the past few months and have a lot of enthusiastic customers, mainly bluetits.
However, watching them in action, they seem to spit out the seeds contained in the balls and we now have a heap of seeds on the ground underneath where they are hanging. Do you think they are actually eating anything? And do any of your make your own? (In which case, how?)