Editorial policy

Sourcing standards

Five kinds of source are acceptable on this site, and nothing else is.

1. Manufacturer specifications and manuals. The backbone of every product claim. Capacity, ports, materials, dimensions, warranty and disassembly all come from the maker or a major retailer listing, and are cited on the page.
2. Live pricing data. Pulled at build time from a live source, expiring after 48 hours.
3. Published standards and extension-service guidance. For cleaning and care, we cite bodies such as the Clemson Cooperative Extension.
4. Established ornithological authorities — the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — for any biological or safety claim, always with a link.
5. Our own arithmetic on published figures, with the inputs shown so you can check the working.

Never acceptable

• Anything written from memory.
• A competitor’s claim restated as fact.
• Invented prices, ratings, review counts or test results.
• Statistics with no source.
• AI-generated product specifications.
• Testimonials or customer reviews we did not receive. We publish none.

Biological and safety claims get real citations

The advice on this site can affect whether a bird lives. Honey causing fungal growth, the 4:1 nectar ratio, red dye, fermentation, mold, cleaning cadence by temperature — every one of those carries a link to an authority, on the page, every time it appears.

Content that gets a hummingbird killed is the worst outcome available to this site, and we would rather be repetitive about sourcing than casual about it. What not to put in nectar · the cleaning cadence.

What this site does not claim

We have not tested these feeders. We own none of them. There is no lab, no trial and no owned unit behind a single recommendation, and no page here will imply otherwise.

We hold no credentials in this field. Scooter M. writes as an enthusiast. There is no certification, degree or professional standing behind anything here, and you will not find this site describing its author with any of the usual authority words — because none of them would be true. Present-tense interest is the whole claim.

We publish no ratings of our own products. Our editorial score out of ten is exactly that — an editorial opinion against published criteria. It is never presented as a customer rating or a test result, and it deliberately never enters this site’s structured data. The method in full.

Commercial independence

We earn affiliate commission on qualifying purchases. No brand receives editorial consideration for commercial reasons, no brand can pay for placement or ranking, and we accept no free products and no sponsored content. That last rule is what keeps “sponsored placements: 0” a true statement rather than a slogan. The full disclosure.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and the address is info@wingandwindow.com.

• Factual errors are corrected as soon as we can verify the correction, and the page’s “last updated” date changes with it.
• Specification changes — a manufacturer revises a product — are updated and re-cited.
• Dead or discontinued products are replaced in the roundup, and the change is noted rather than done silently.
• Disagreements about a pick get a real answer. If you think a recommendation is indefensible on our own stated criteria, that is a fair challenge and we will either change it or explain why we disagree.

Update cadence

• Daily: live price refresh. This does not change any page’s “last updated” date, because nothing about the content changed.
• Monthly: check for discontinued products and out-of-stock top picks.
• Quarterly: re-verify specifications on every roundup pick against the manufacturer source.
• Annually: roll year-dated pages and refresh seasonal timing content.

On freshness dates

We only stamp a date we actually re-verified. Restamping a page with today’s date because a script ran is a lie about how current the content is, and it is exactly the practice this site was built to be an alternative to. If a page says it was updated, the content changed.