How we pick

What we actually do

Five things, all of them checkable by anybody with a browser and ten minutes.

1. Compile published specifications. Diameters, pole fits, capacities, roll lengths, breaking loads, mixing ratios, stated life expectancies. Taken from the manufacturer’s or retailer’s own listing and cited on every product card. Across the site that is currently 41 distinct specification sources over 38 products with a pinned listing.
2. Apply the clearance geometry. Every baffle, pole and feeder pick is measured against the published figures below, because placement decides more outcomes than product does.
3. Compare against the mount types people actually own. A round pole, a nominal 4x4 post at 3.5 in, a shepherd’s hook, a hanging branch, a deck rail. A baffle that does not fit your mount is not a worse baffle, it is an irrelevant one.
4. Check prices live. Prices come from a daily data layer and are date-stamped. Where there is no live figure the button says “Check price”.
5. Name at least one thing to skip on every roundup. With the reason.

What we do not do

This is the part most sites in this category leave out, so we will be direct about it.

• We do not test products. We have not installed a baffle, run a repellent trial, or measured a squirrel. Nothing on this site should be read as a test result.
• We do not own most of these products. Where we describe a dimension, it is because a manufacturer published it, not because we measured it.
• We have no lab, no test yard and no instrumented rig.
• We accept no free products and no paid placement. Nothing has been sent to us and nothing has been paid for.
• We publish no ratings or review counts, ours or anybody else’s, and we emit no Review markup and no aggregate-rating structured data. A rating asserts an evaluation we did not perform.

The obvious question is then: why trust any of it? Because the work we have done is reproducible. Every number has a named source, every piece of arithmetic is shown, and any reader can check the lot in an afternoon. A test result you cannot verify is worth less than a citation you can.

The clearance spec, which is most of the argument

The single most useful thing on this site is not a product recommendation. It is the geometry that decides whether any of them work, and it comes from two named sources that agree with each other.

The arithmetic: a gray squirrel jumps up to four feet vertically, so a baffle whose top sits at four to five feet cannot be cleared from the ground. The same animal covers roughly eight feet horizontally, so anything solid within eight to ten feet is a launch platform that puts it above the baffle, where the baffle is irrelevant.

How we rank

Four criteria, in this order.

1. Fit. Does the maker publish that it fits the mount the reader owns? A product that does not is excluded rather than ranked low.
2. Mechanism. Does the published design address the actual failure mode? Overhang, length, weight, geometry, exclusion by mesh size. We rank on what the thing does, not on adjectives about what it achieves.
3. Published detail. A maker that publishes a diameter, a breaking load or a mixing ratio is giving you something to check. One that publishes only adjectives is not, and we say so on the product card rather than filling the gap ourselves.
4. Durability signals. Material and construction as published: steel versus plastic, galvanized versus painted, stated life expectancy, stated warranty.

Where a maker publishes nothing for a spec, the spec row says so. We would rather show a gap than fill it with an estimate, because an estimate presented as a specification is exactly the failure this site exists to correct.

When we say skip

Every roundup on this site names at least one product or approach to avoid, with the reason. That is a deliberate editorial rule, and it exists because a comparison in which nothing has a downside is an advertisement with a table in it.

Sometimes the thing to skip is a product we otherwise recommend, in a situation where it is wrong. Erva’s 8 in post baffle is a real product that we list, and around a nominal 4x4 post it leaves roughly 2.25 in of standoff per side — which we say plainly, because that arithmetic matters more than a ranking position.

Where the sources disagree

We show the disagreement, name both parties, and explain which is right and why. The clearest example is baffle mounting height: Audubon publishes four to five feet; a page-one affiliate result publishes six to ten. Those cannot both be right, and the second is unbuildable on a standard feeder pole.

Smoothing that over would be easier and less useful. The clearance guide works it through in full.

How we make money

Baffleworks is an Amazon Associate and earns a commission on qualifying purchases made through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. That is the entire business model.

• Commission never determines rank. Amazon’s rate is a category rate; it does not vary between the products we compare, so there is nothing to bias even if we wanted to.
• Buyer first. Where a product is better bought elsewhere, or is not worth buying at all, we say so and earn nothing.
• No sponsored placements, no free products, no gifted samples.

The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page.

How to correct us

Email info@baffleworks.com. If we have a specification wrong, a source misquoted, or a link pointing somewhere it should not, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. Corrections are handled first, ahead of everything else in the inbox.

The editorial policy sets out the sourcing standard, the update cadence, and the list of claims we never make.

Current scope

Baffleworks currently publishes 39 content pages across six sections, all of them written to the standard above.