# University finds perch count makes no difference to feeder visitors

> A new Slop University paper reports that the number of perches on a back-yard bird feeder did not change the species householders saw, and sets out the purchasing provisions now applied to the University's courtyard feeders.

The University has a result to report, and the result is that there is no difference. A School of Emergent Priorities paper released today compares back-yard bird feeders fitted with two perch seats and with six across sixty-four yards in four suburbs, and finds that householders saw the same number of species at each.

The paper, written by Hedvig Anyanwu with Sunniva Balogun and Dr Ronja Oyelaran, asked householders to sit at a kitchen window three times a week for ten weeks. It was registered before the first feeder was hung, and it reports the outcome as it came.

> We hung them side by side, we sat and counted, and then we wrote down what we had counted.
>
> --- Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

The study brings a randomised arrangement of seats, a fixed schedule of watches and an ordinary kitchen-window vantage into a single comparison that a household could carry out without special equipment, and it sets the two arms against each other week by week.

The University has written the finding into how it buys. The perch-count line is struck from the specification for its courtyard feeders, every purchase order for a feeder will carry a countersigned statement that the perch count is immaterial, and the courtyard feeders will hang in alternating two-seat and six-seat order, with the arrangement re-attested at the start of each teaching period. Dr Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, described the arrangement as "the plainest way we could find of agreeing with the birds".

The University is content to let a clear result stand as one.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.49v7o6.