The most effective way to keep hawks away from your bird feeders is to combine several strategies: place feeders near natural cover, use caged feeder designs, and temporarily remove feeders when a hawk establishes a hunting pattern in your yard. No single trick will solve the problem, but layering these approaches makes your feeding station a far less productive hunting ground.
The hawks visiting your yard are almost certainly Cooper’s Hawks or Sharp-shinned Hawks, the two species most likely to hunt songbirds at feeders. Between October 2015 and April 2022, participants in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch recorded 1,186 instances of Cooper’s Hawks catching a bird at feeders and 677 instances involving Sharp-shinned Hawks. Cooper’s Hawks tend to target medium and larger birds like starlings and pigeons, while Sharp-shinned Hawks go after smaller species like juncos and siskins. Both are protected under federal law, so lethal methods and trapping are illegal. Your goal is to make the feeder area a difficult place to hunt, not to harm the hawk.
Place Feeders Near Escape Cover
Hawks rely on surprise. They strike fast, and songbirds survive by reaching dense cover before the hawk can close the distance. The single most important thing you can do is position your feeders about 10 to 12 feet from a dense shrub, hedge, or brush pile. This gives small birds enough reaction time to spot the hawk and enough nearby cover to disappear into. Closer than that and the hawk can use the same cover to launch an ambush. Farther away and the songbirds may not reach safety in time.
Evergreen shrubs work especially well because they provide year-round density. A thick holly, boxwood, or juniper hedge within that 10-to-12-foot range creates a reliable escape route. If you don’t have established shrubs, a temporary brush pile made from pruned branches does the job. Stack branches loosely so small birds can dart inside but larger hawks can’t follow.
Use Caged and Covered Feeders
Wire-caged feeders are designed to let small birds like chickadees, finches, and nuthatches slip through the grid while blocking larger birds. These cages also make it physically impossible for a hawk to reach the birds inside. The National Wildlife Federation recommends these as a practical option, noting that caged feeders designed to exclude jays can also help small birds dodge hawks.
Feeders with solid roofs or non-transparent covers add another layer of protection. Hawks hunt by sight, often from a perch above the feeding area. A roof blocks their view of the birds below, making it harder to time an attack. If your current feeders are open-top platform styles, switching to hopper feeders with roofs or adding an opaque cover above them reduces the hawk’s advantage considerably.
Ground-feeding birds like sparrows and doves are especially vulnerable because they feed in the open with limited sightlines. Switching to hanging platform feeders lifts these species off the ground and into a position where they can spot threats more easily. Some people also install low rabbit fencing (about 4 feet high) around ground feeding areas, which disrupts a hawk’s low swooping approach without blocking songbird access.
Break Up the Hunting Pattern
Hawks are intelligent predators and learn routines. If a Cooper’s Hawk discovers that your yard reliably concentrates prey at the same spot every morning, it will return day after day. The most direct way to break this cycle is to take your feeders down for a week or two. Without the predictable cluster of songbirds, the hawk moves on to hunt elsewhere. Once you put the feeders back up, songbirds typically return within a few days. There’s always a chance the hawk will come back eventually, but it generally takes time for it to rediscover the spot.
You can also vary your feeding schedule. Instead of keeping feeders full at all times, fill them at irregular intervals or rotate which feeders are active. This prevents the consistent congregation of birds that makes your yard an easy target. Hawks that find unpredictable hunting grounds invest their energy elsewhere.
Reduce Open Sightlines
Hawks prefer to hunt in areas where they have a clear flight path and good visibility. A yard with a wide open lawn and a feeder standing alone in the middle is ideal hunting territory. Adding vertical elements near (but not directly at) your feeders disrupts those clean attack lines. Trellises with climbing plants, garden umbrellas, or even crisscrossed string or fishing line above the feeding area all create obstacles that make a high-speed dive riskier for the hawk.
The goal isn’t to build a fortress. You’re just adding enough visual clutter and physical barriers that the hawk chooses easier hunting grounds. Even a few strategically placed garden structures near your feeders can change the equation.
What Doesn’t Work
Fake owls, reflective tape, and plastic predator decoys are commonly sold as hawk deterrents. Hawks are intelligent enough to recognize a stationary object that never moves as harmless, usually within a day or two. If you use a decoy, you’d need to move it multiple times daily, and even then, results are unreliable.
Ultrasonic devices marketed as bird deterrents are similarly ineffective. Hawks and most birds don’t hear ultrasonic frequencies the way mammals do, so these products have no meaningful impact on hawk behavior.
Wind chimes, shiny spinners, and similar motion-based deterrents may cause brief hesitation the first time a hawk encounters them, but habituation happens quickly. These items are better thought of as minor supplements to the structural strategies above, not standalone solutions.
Keeping Perspective
A hawk visiting your feeders is, in a real sense, a sign that your backyard habitat is working. You’ve created a functioning food web. Cooper’s Hawks and Sharp-shinned Hawks have always hunted songbirds. Feeders concentrate prey in ways that make this more visible, but the predation itself is natural. Most songbird populations are not meaningfully affected by hawk predation at feeders.
The strategies above will reduce how often you witness a kill and make your feeder area safer for the birds you’re feeding. But an occasional hawk visit is part of hosting a backyard ecosystem, and a healthy songbird population can absorb it without trouble.