Twelve years of Big Garden Birdwatch tally sheets are pinned to the wall of Dudley Tunnicliffe’s forge. Last January’s fits on one line. — The 74-year-old Shropshire smith has spent eight winters building a feeder for the birds that can’t use a feeder. He is finishing the last of them now, and selling them for less than they cost him.

Every January since 2014, on the last weekend of the month, Dudley Tunnicliffe has sat at his kitchen window for an hour with a pencil and counted, along with 650,000 other people across the country. Robin, blackbird, blue tit, dunnock, wren, song thrush, goldfinch, greenfinch. The sheets go up on a nail in the forge. In 2015 he needed both sides of the paper. This January, three weeks after the hardest frost in a decade, he wrote down four birds and put the pencil away.

He is not the only one. The RSPB’s count runs in half a million gardens, and the long trend points one way. Britain has lost 38 million birds from its skies in fifty years. The house sparrow and the starling, birds nobody thought could become scarce, are both on the Red List. The greenfinch, a fixture at every feeder twenty years ago, has fallen by 64 per cent and joined them on the Red List.

What most people don’t know is why the greenfinch went. It wasn’t cats. It wasn’t the cold. It was the way we feed them.

The Feeder Nobody Cleans

Left: a thin layer of seed, which is all it should hold. Right: swilled out in May and left to the rain, it does a summer’s work as a drinking dish.

In 2005 a parasite called trichomonosis was found in British finches for the first time. It passes from bird to bird through saliva, through food and water fouled with it, and it spreads fastest wherever birds crowd onto the same stale seed for days on end. That is most feeders in most gardens: filled on a Saturday, picked at all week, cleaned when someone remembers. Within a decade of the parasite arriving, the greenfinch had collapsed. In January 2025 the RSPB pulled its own bird tables off sale while it reviewed the evidence, and its chief executive put the new rule plainly this year: nobody is asking people to stop feeding, only to feed in a way that protects the birds’ long-term health. Little. Often. Clean.

Almost nothing on the garden-centre shelf is built for that. A tube holds a fortnight’s seed and has a dozen places a cloth will never reach. And it is, Dudley points out, the wrong shape for half the birds that need it anyway. “A tube is for birds that cling,” he says. “Tits, finches, a nuthatch. A robin can’t cling. A blackbird can’t. A wren, a dunnock, a thrush. They stand on the ground underneath picking up what falls, and the ground is where the cat is.”

So the birds that are already struggling get the worst of both: a feeder they cannot use, hanging over a patch of frozen lawn where everything that wants to eat them is waiting.

Why October Decides January

There is a reason Dudley wants these hanging in gardens now, and not in the first week of frost. A robin chooses its winter territory in October. It will defend a patch of hedge, lawn and fence from every other robin until March, and whatever is inside that patch is what it lives on. If your garden has nothing in it when the territories are drawn up, the robin draws its line somewhere else.

“You can hang a dish out on Christmas Eve and you’ll get something,” Dudley says. “But the birds that come in January are the ones that found you in the autumn. The rest have already decided where they’re spending the winter.”

Last January’s cold spell made the point for him. On 6 January 2026, nine Met Office stations dropped below minus ten in a single night, Marham in Norfolk to minus 12.5°C. A small bird can burn through a tenth of its body weight on a night like that. By dawn it has perhaps an hour to replace it. It will not spend that hour searching. It goes where it already knows.

It Started With a Broken Brolly

Dudley Tunnicliffe, 74, in the forge behind his cottage in Church Stretton. Forty years a farrier and smith; eight winters making feeders. The two in his hands are from the final batch.

Dudley shod horses for a living. From 1968 until his knees gave out, he worked the farms between Church Stretton and Bishop’s Castle, and in the quiet months he made gates, weathervanes and fire irons in the forge behind the cottage. His wife, Jean, kept the garden for forty-one years. The birds were her department. She died in the autumn of 2017.

The feeder was never designed. That February, a gale caught Jean’s old green umbrella, which was still leaning by the back door where she had left it, turned it inside out and dumped it in her flower bed. Dudley left it there for a week because he could not face picking it up. When he finally went out, there was a robin standing in it. Rain had collected in the upturned canopy, a few seeds had blown in from the table, and the bird was eating out of the dish it made.

“I stood at the window and watched it for ten minutes,” he says. “Then a blackbird came and did the same. Big open dish, nothing to cling to, up off the ground. Every bird I’d been trying to feed for years was suddenly fed. By an umbrella. Jean would have laughed.”

He went into the forge that afternoon and made one out of copper.

What a Farrier Does Differently

The bowl is raised from flat sheet over a stake, a few thousand hammer blows per piece. The hook is bent hot. Nothing is cast or pressed.

A man who has spent forty years making things that horses stand on has opinions about what birds stand on. The feeder is twenty-two centimetres across and twenty-eight tall to the top of the hook, and almost every part of it exists because of something Dudley watched go wrong with a shop-bought one.

The Pencil on the Windowsill

The Birdwatch is one weekend a year. Dudley does it every morning. There is a stub of pencil on the kitchen windowsill and a Shropshire Star folded to the margin, and before the kettle has boiled he has written down what is on the dish. He has done it for eight winters. He can tell you that the song thrush first came back on 11 February 2021, and that the greenfinch, which he had not seen in the garden since 2012, turned up on a Tuesday in December two years ago and has not missed a winter since.

“People ask me if it’s the copper or the cleaning,” he says. “I don’t know. I rinse it every morning when I fill it, because it takes less time than the kettle. I’ve got eight years of what turned up written down on a newspaper. The greenfinch came back the second winter after I took the plastic one down. Make of that what you like.”

Seed on the Left, Mealworms on the Right

The arrangement most of Dudley’s customers end up with: two dishes a yard apart, sunflower hearts in one and dried mealworms in the other.

The second dish was the customers’ idea, not Dudley’s. Finches and tits want seed. Robins, wrens and blackbirds want mealworms and suet, and a robin will spend half the morning chasing everything else off a dish it has decided is his. Hang two, a yard or so apart, and the chasing stops. The finches get the seed, the robin gets his mealworms and his dignity, and the garden is twice as busy for the price of a second hook.

Ninety-Six Bowls, Already Raised

Raising copper is the one job in a forge you cannot do with a bad grip. The sheet sits on an iron stake and you work round and round it with a hammer, thousands of light blows, tightening the metal into a bowl. It is not heavy work. It is work that needs a hand that closes and stays closed for an hour.

Dudley’s left hand stopped doing that this spring. The arthritis that has been in his knuckles for nine years reached the point where the consultant in Shrewsbury told him, kindly, that the next bowl might be the one that sends a chisel through his palm. He finished the one on the stake and has not raised another since.

What he has is a shelf of bowls he raised through the winter, before the hand went: ninety-six of them, waiting for hooks, birds and finishing. He can do that part. The hooks are bent hot with tongs, the sculpted bird is fixed with a rivet, and the copper is burnished and sealed at the bench. He expects to be done by Christmas. After that the forge becomes a shed.

“I don’t mind,” he says, and seems to mean it. “Forty years is a fair go. I’d just like the last ninety-six to end up somewhere a blackbird can find them.”

“I’m Not Selling Copper. I’m Selling a January.”

Dudley and his grandson Alfie, 4, under the crab apple. Alfie’s job is the mealworms. He takes it seriously.

His granddaughter Hattie, who is 24 and set up the little online shop for him, sat down with a calculator before the price went live. Copper sheet, iron rod, the copper bird, postage, packaging. She told him £29 left almost nothing. He told her that was the point. “I’m not selling copper,” he said. “I’m selling a January. A robin on a dish on a frozen morning. You can’t charge sixty quid for that and expect it to end up in a hundred gardens.”

Alfie asked him last winter, standing under the crab apple, whether the robin would die if they forgot the mealworms. Dudley told him the truth, which is probably, and that this is why you don’t forget. Alfie has not forgotten since. He is four.

“That’s the whole business plan,” Dudley says. “A lad who checks the dish before breakfast. If I can get ninety-six more of those going before I pack up, I’ll have done something.” He looks at the crab apple. “The first one’s still hanging where Jean’s umbrella landed. I’d like it to have company.”

What People Wrote Back

A reader near Much Wenlock, the afternoon hers arrived. She emailed the next morning: a robin, a dunnock and “something small and brown I haven’t identified yet.”

Three Questions Hattie Answers Every Day

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