San Angelo Wildlife Feeder

Our first automatic deer feeder was a San Angelo Wildlife Feeder. It was a small feeder that used a photocell to spin at daybreak and dusk. It was contained in a simple plastic housing and used a six volt lantern battery to power the electronics. The cone was metal and bolted to the bottom of the barrel/can in combination with the feeder. This cone set-up was very easy to adjust and worked quite well. There was a dial inside the unit to adjust the feed time from 3 to 18 seconds.

This deer feeder was extremely simple to operate. To test the feeder and feed rate all you had to do was hold something over the photocell to imitate darkness and it would spin.

The best thing about this feeder was its simplicity, while the downside of this feeder may also have been its simplicity. Over the years we have grown to like the ability to choose exactly when and how many times the feeder spins.

I’m not sure exactly when we purchased this feeder, it was probably well over 10 years ago. Raccoons hanging on this feeder bent the shaft and we had replaced it with a Smart Timer some years ago but we revived it when we converted our self serve bucket feeder into an automatic feeder for a few months during the 2005-2006 season and then we used it for a few months late in 2006 when one of our Smart Timer feeders broke. The San Angelo feeder finally broke as well after a couple more months. This feeder didn’t cost much back when we purchased it and we got several years of good use from it. Before it broke we got to experiment with it a little and had a lot of fun moving it around when we had it attached to the 5 gallon bucket.

My internet search could not find any deer feeders still manufactured by San Angelo but there are low priced deer feeders available at Cabela's.

This is our San Angelo Wildlife Feeder when we had it on a 5 gallon plastic bucket.