Pat Marshall is the inventor of the Twirl-a-Squirrel™ Electronic Bird Feeder Baffle. He relates here the story of how the idea for Twirl-a-Squirrel™ came to be:

“I was sitting in my kitchen one day watching the birds eating when I noticed that I could not see the birds on the opposite side of the feeder. I tried to move from one window to another to get a glimpse at the birds but was frustrated in that I could not figure out what kinds of birds they were!

That is when I thought of the initial version of the ‘Twirl-a-Squirrel™’ invention! Except this version would be for rotating birds very slowly.

“So about a week later I had a crude prototype made that had a wire that went from the top of the feeder to an on/off switch inside my house. Then when birds landed I turned the on/off switch on and was pleasantly surprised to see that at certain RPMs, the birds did not mind at all the rotating bird feeders. In fact I think they liked it more since now they too could see 360 degrees around them, which was great for looking out for predators like house cats trying to sneak up on the feeding birds.

“Well one day, while I was testing my new invention, a squirrel jumped on the feeder, which of course scared away all of the birds. This was when I asked myself, ‘If I rotated the hanging feeder fast enough, would the squirrel want to jump off? So I took my prototype down, made some minor modifications to the gearbox and motor and hung it back up again the next day. This time when a squirrel jumped on, I turned the ‘high-speed’ switch on and was so excited to see that my new invention ‘Twirl-a-Squirrel™’ worked fantastic! The squirrel did indeed get dizzy after about five seconds of riding the ‘merry-go-round’ feeder. As the days went by, it was even more fun watching the squirrels all try and defeat this invention. Of course they never did!”