About Baffleworks
A site about the two fights homeowners actually lose: squirrels on the feeder and deer, rabbits and chipmunks in the garden. Calm design, sharp writing, every number sourced.
Why this site exists
It started with a number that is wrong. Search for how high to mount a squirrel baffle and you will find a page-one result telling you six to ten feet. Audubon says four to five. Those cannot both be right, and the six-to-ten figure is unbuildable on a standard feeder pole, which hangs at six to seven feet.
Somebody followed that advice, mounted a baffle where it could not work, and concluded that baffles do not work. That happens constantly in this category, because almost nobody publishes the geometry that decides the outcome. The whole site is built around fixing it.
The editorial position is one sentence: the clearance is the variable, and the product is secondary. Everything else here follows from that.
Who writes it
Scooter M.. An enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, and do the math. No lab coat.
That is the whole biography, and it is deliberately not padded. There is no wildlife biology degree behind this site, no years of professional pest control, no test lab and no team. Inventing any of those would be the easiest thing in the world and the fastest way to lose the argument, because they are all trivially falsifiable.
What there is instead: manufacturers’ published specifications, cooperative extension publications, Audubon and Cornell, arithmetic shown step by step, and a citation on every figure. That is a real body of work, it is verifiable, and — going by what the competition publishes — it is the uncontested gap in this niche.
What we do not claim
A stat block on a site like this usually exists to accumulate reasons to trust it. These are the claims we refuse to make, where zero is the number we want.
- Units we claim to have tested
- 0
- Sponsored placements accepted
- 0
- Free products accepted
- 0
- Prices we print from memory
- 0
- Specification sources cited
- 41
- Products with a pinned listing
- 38
Everyone in this category says they tested twenty baffles. We have not tested any, and we say so. What we did instead is read the manuals, compile the published specifications, work out the clearance arithmetic, and cite every source — which is the part a reader can actually check. How we pick sets the whole standard out in detail.
What Baffleworks covers
39 pages across six sections, split by theater and then by mechanism, because that is how the problem actually presents itself:
- The feeder war — baffles, feeders and poles.
- The garden war — cages, cloches and netting and deer deterrence.
- Both at once — active deterrents, where one motion sprinkler serves a garden bed and a deer approach equally.
Covering both halves is deliberate and, as far as we can tell, unusual. The animal digging up your bulbs is very often the animal on your feeder, and a bird feeder within sight of the vegetable beds is subsidizing the population eating them. Treating those as one problem is the point of the site.
Getting in touch
Email info@baffleworks.com. Corrections are dealt with first: if a specification is wrong or a source is misquoted, we want to know and we will fix it and note the change.
Baffleworks is published by Slate Mill Group.