Feeding the large but not the little

[Hezz]

I need something like a spring-loaded feeder to activate the opposite to how squirrel-resistant feeders work. in other words, a spring loader perch that opens under a certain weight (conure) but not with only a light (budgie) touch. Something that will stay closed under up to 50g weight, or larger, but open for 100g+. All searches have come up empty. There is something close made for chooks, but nothing on a smaller scale. Has anyone come across anything like this in their cyber-travels??

(I need a tame handy-person who is good at working through thoughts and designs from the imagination to the real and practical)

[Deleted]

Sorry, that last part made me giggle.

So I'm imagining something with a perch that pulls a door open, but the perch would probably have to drop down slightly to do it, so it's whether said conure would be comfortable with that.

Perch being connected to the door so that the weight of the bird lowers them both.

And then the spring action would pull them back up when Mr Conure leaves.

I feel like one of your hardest challenges would be finding a spring of the correct tension.
But other than that it could maybe be a mini version of the chook one?

[Hezz]

Having the perch shift to lift the lid would only be an initial issue, if one at all. Finding the right spring would have to be real trial and error unless whoever was versed in such things. That’s not me, but it might have to become me. Something used for model transport might be about right.

I might have just found my next project .... I can tell already that it would be a very, very slow one!!! The one person I know who is good at this sort of thing is well into the throes of Parkinson’s.

[willowsmum]

Just wondered how this was going Hezz? I was chatting about it yesterday but all we could come up with was a weighted see-saw design (or the somewhat fanciful camera with facial recognition software ) Sorry!

[birdguhl]

This sounds like a project for an engineering student, Hezz. Do you have any universities or colleges nearby?

[Hezz]

I like the facial recognition idea, willowsmum!! Perfect.

To be honest, I haven’t given it much more thought, but you may be right, birdguhl. An engineering student should be able to cobble something together in no time. I will have to give it some more thought. I haven’t really had the time to try to work something out. For now I stand guard, which doesn’t work all the time, obviously. Loki isn’t too bad at telling the boys off, but I don’t really want to encourage him too much as there are times when I want them all to feed from the same pot.