Reinforce your nestbox defences with a hole plate

Great-spotted woodpeckers and grey squirrels will sometimes attack nestboxes to gain access to eggs and chicks. This is often a particular problem in years where alternative food supplies for squirrels and woodpeckers are less abundant and they are struggling to find sufficient food. Unfortunately once they have discovered that a nest box contains a good source of food they may come to associate nest boxes with food and target other nestboxes, often in subsequent years. One way of reducing the chances of squirrels or woodpeckers from predating chicks and eggs from your nestboxes is to install some reinforcement around the entrance hole. To gain access to the eggs and chicks both squirrels and woodpeckers will enlarge the entrance hole to a size that they can fit through. Metal protection plates can be used to frustrate squirrels and woodpeckers as even the most determined squirrel can’t chew through a steel plate!

A secondary use of nestbox hole plates is to reduce the hole size of one of your nest boxes if you want to change the range of birds your box is likely to attract. For example if you have a small bird box with a 32mm hole but would prefer to limit access to the smaller tit species such as coal tit then fixing a 25mm hole plate to your box would keep out many of the larger garden birds and make it more likely that it would be occupied by blue or coal tits.

Our hole plates are made from stainless steel, so there's no chance of them rusting and available in four sizes (25mm, 28mm, 32mm & 45mm) to enable you to choose the size appropriate to your box. Each plate comes supplied with four screws to attach it to your box.

For more information please see our Hole Plates product page.