“Seed left out in the rain is porridge by teatime and mould by Thursday.” — Why a 76-year-old Lake District roofer put a roof over the bird feeder, and is selling his last ones at a special price.

After a wet week in November, most bird tables in Britain look the same: a tray of grey, swollen seed sitting in a puddle, starting to sprout at the edges. The tube feeder beside it has clumped at the ports. And on the fence, looking at both, sits a robin with nothing to eat.

Robins, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens and song thrushes don’t cling to a tube the way a blue tit does. They eat standing up, off a flat surface, which means a bird table, an open dish or the lawn. In a British winter, all three are wet most of the time. Britain has lost around 38 million birds from its skies in fifty years, and the greenfinch, once at every bird table, has fallen by more than sixty per cent, largely from a disease that spreads through damp, fouled food.

Horace Pendlebury spent forty-four years roofing cottages in the wettest corner of England. When he watched his wife’s bird table turn to mush, his answer was the one a roofer would come up with: put a roof over it.

What Rain and the Branch Above Do to an Open Dish

Wet seed doesn’t just go to waste. Within a few days it sprouts and grows mould, and mouldy food is how garden birds get aspergillosis, a fungal infection of the lungs. Damp, fouled food is also where the parasite that wiped out the greenfinch spreads fastest. The RSPB’s advice is plain: feed little and often, keep it clean, and never let food go damp or mouldy.

Then there is everything that falls from above. A feeder hangs from a branch, and the branch is where the birds queue. Droppings, wet leaves, bits of bark: all of it lands in an open dish and sits in the food. In summer the same dish, filled with water, is a green puddle within days. Rain, droppings, leaves and sun are the four things an open dish can’t keep out.

Left: November, rain running off the roof and the seed underneath still dry. Right: July, the same dish swilled out and filled with water, clean and in its own shade.

Why November Decides the Winter

There is a reason Horace wants these up now and not after Christmas. A robin settles its winter territory in the autumn and defends it until spring. Blue tits and coal tits fix their feeding rounds before the first frost and keep to them. A bird that finds dry food in your garden in November builds your garden into its winter. A bird that finds a dish of grey slop moves on.

The weather makes the point. A small bird can lose a tenth of its body weight on a cold, wet night just keeping warm, and wet feathers make it worse. By first light it has a few hours to put that back, and it won’t spend them picking through a puddle. It goes where it already knows the food is dry.

What the Roof Changes

Rain dripping off the edge of the roof, and the mealworms under it still dry.

It Started the Week Keswick Flooded

Horace Pendlebury, 76, in the workshop behind his cottage in Braithwaite. Forty-four years a slater and leadworker; ten winters making feeders. The Umbrella in one hand, the Cottage Roof in the other.

Horace slated cottages and re-leaded gutters from Borrowdale to Bassenthwaite for forty-four years. His wife, Maureen, has kept the bird table in their garden for forty-eight. In December 2015, Storm Desmond put Keswick under water, and for a week afterwards Maureen’s bird table was a tray of grey mush. The robin that had used it for three winters sat on the wall and stared at it.

“Forty-four years I’d been keeping rain off other people’s heads,” Horace says. “Never once thought about the robin.” That afternoon he folded an offcut of sheet into a little pitched roof and hung a dish under it. By the next downpour there were five birds underneath, eating dry seed, while the rain ran off both sides.

He makes it in two shapes now, because gardens differ. The Umbrella has a ribbed canopy over a deep round dish and suits a branch out in the open. The Cottage Roof has a pitched roof on four posts, sheds rain like a slate roof, and looks right on a pergola or a wall bracket.

Where to Hang It

The best spot is about head height, within a couple of metres of a hedge, a shrub or a tree. Robins and dunnocks like to dart into cover when a sparrowhawk comes over, and they use a dish far more often when the cover is close. Keep it well away from anything a cat could jump from.

An apple branch, a pergola beam, a shepherd’s crook or a wall bracket by the back door all work; the chain and S-hook go over any of them without tools. If you can see it from the kitchen window, so much the better. Most customers say it becomes the thing they check before the kettle boils.

Sunflower Hearts in One, Mealworms in the Other

What most of Horace’s customers end up with: one of each, a yard apart, sunflower hearts in one and dried mealworms in the other.

Tits and finches want sunflower hearts. Robins, wrens and blackbirds want mealworms, and a robin will spend half the morning chasing everything else off a dish it has claimed. Hang two, a yard or so apart, and the chasing stops. The finches get their seed, the robin gets his mealworms and his dignity, and the garden is twice as busy.

Who Turns Up

Maureen keeps a notebook on the kitchen windowsill for the BTO’s Garden BirdWatch, and before the kettle has boiled she has written down who is under the roof. On a good morning she has had eleven species through one dish: robin, blackbird, dunnock, wren, blue tit, coal tit, chaffinch, goldfinch and, twice this autumn, a song thrush she had stopped expecting.

“People ask me if it’s the roof or the cleaning,” Horace says. “I don’t know. She rinses it every morning when she fills it, because it takes less time than the kettle. All I know is the birds are eating dry food, and they weren’t before.”

“I’m Not Selling Tin. I’m Selling a Dry Breakfast.”

Horace and his grandson Fergus, 6, under the rowan. Fergus’s job is the mealworms, wellies on, rain or not. He takes it seriously.

His granddaughter Isla, 24, set up the little online shop for him and sat down with a calculator before the price went live. She told him £29 left almost nothing. “I’m not selling tin,” he said. “I’m selling a dry breakfast. A robin under a roof when it’s been chucking it down for a week. You can’t charge sixty quid for that and expect it to end up in a hundred gardens.”

Folding sheet needs arms that go up and stay up, and Horace’s shoulders stopped doing that this spring. What he has left is a shelf of roofs he cut before they went: a hundred and twelve, waiting for dishes and chains. He fits those sitting down, Isla checks and boxes each one, and when they’re gone, the workshop becomes a shed.

A reader near Kirkby Lonsdale, the afternoon hers arrived. She emailed the next morning: a robin, two coal tits and “something small and brown I haven’t identified yet.”

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