Birders

present year round, and they don't touch the sunflowers' leaves for whatever reason, despite the chickadees being omnipresent at our nearby feeders.

Our sunflowers still get ravaged as you have captured in that pic, however, but by Lesser Goldfinches instead.

And no, I've got no idea how to prevent it. We've tried out-planting their appetite, that was only marginally successful. We ended up with a bunch more only slightly less moth-eaten sunflowers.