How to help Supplementing a natural diet by providing nutritious food for the adults, such as sunflower seeds or mealworms, will help parent birds that may be struggling to feed both themselves and their young families. House sparrows on commercial bird feeders. You can create your own — information on food types is available here It is vital, however, to prevent disease, and feeding mouldy food that has become toxic, forgetting to clean bird feeders, or allowing the bird feeding area or the ground underneath to become dirty, can be much worse than not feeding at all.
Wildlife Watch - How to make your own bird feeder activity sheet. Water A most vital element for life is water. A home-made bird bath. Plants to help feed your garden birds In the wild, birds have evolved to survive on whatever nature provides.
Fruits and berries What can be more cheering on a cold, bleak day than a garden full of plump, glossy berries, hanging in bunches, or suspended artfully from stems, studding fences and walls with sumptuous necklaces of edible beads for the birds?
Garden Honeysuckle. Holly berries. Ivy berries in the garden. Rowan berries. Blackbird on berries. Blackberries attract insects and birds.
Home How to Maintain the garden What to feed the birds all year round. What to feed birds — feeder filled with sunflower hearts. What to feed birds — gardener adding mealworms to a bird table. How to feed garden birds — robin on a bird table in winter. What to feed garden birds — hungry chicks in the nest. What to feed birds — female blackbird gathering earthworms to feed its young. What to feed birds — waxwing eating rowan berries.
Subscribe now. Buy now for spring flowers. Hurry - limited time only. Ends in: 2 days. Christmas Wreath-Making. Sunflower seeds should be provided in a hanging seed feeder or scattered on a flat surface. Cheaper ones tend to include a high proportion of cereal grains that are popular with sparrows and pigeons but not much else.
If you want to cater for these species and they deserve food too! The seeds are very fine, so are much loved by the finches that traditionally enjoy thistle seeds — most notably Goldfinches, but also Siskin and Redpoll. Nyjer requires a specialised bird feeder with smaller holes as it can be quite messy. Be wary of very cheap supermarket options that tend to be very poor in any sort of nutrients and can be quite tough for birds to eat.
Avoid hanging fatballs in the plastic netting that they sometimes come in — these are very dangerous for birds!
These are expensive, but high in protein and are loved by Robins, Dunnocks and other species that prefer to eat insects above all else. You can add them in with the seeds in your feeder if you want or scatter them on a bird table or on the ground. This is a good food to provide in the spring and summer in particular, when you should stop feeding fatballs and suet blocks.
Thrush species, including Blackbird, will enjoy chopped apples, pears, figs, grapes, currents, raisins, sultanas etc. Blackcaps famously enjoy halved apples stuck onto a tree branch or other spike. Cut up any larger fruits into smaller pieces so that they can be eaten with ease. As with everything, never put out anything mouldy for the birds! Buying live food can be more expensive but the results are worth it.
CJ Wildlife provide a range of live bird food and starter kits. They have mealworms and waxworms, dried and live. I particularly like their Live Food Taster Pack. This is ideal to get a feel for what it is like to use live food. It will also give you an idea as to which birds like it, or not.
See the latest range and prices here. Feeding birds in summer can be fun — you get to spend more time outdoors and see way more activity than you would sheltering from bad weather. In the summer wild birds will need protein in their diet. This is especially important when they are moulting. Suitable foods include; mealworms, black sunflower seeds, soaked raisins and any good quality seed mix. Again, a switch to live food is a good idea. It will increase the availability of suitable food for young birds, fresh out of the nest.
Other summer bird foods can include natural fruits. You can chop up apples and pears but make sure they are soft. Some birds also enjoy grapes and bananas too. While we want to do our best for the visitors, we often get it a bit wrong. I am guilty of throwing out scraps of bread and crusts to the garden, thinking I am helping the birds. Maybe the bigger birds like those awful Pigeons will be OK but for smaller birds, larger chunks of bread can choke their young.
For the same reason you should also avoid using whole peanuts and fat when feeding birds through the summer. I recommend that from time to time you dig over any soil you may have in your garden.
We have a clay soil in our garden that gets very sodden in the winter but really quite hard in the summer. This means that earth worms and other bugs are not as widely available to ground feeding birds, like Black birds and Robins. I quite often try to dig over the earth in the borders to expose anything tasty.
Quite often I spot a Robin watching me from just a metre or two away. Once I move away he is straight in there to feed. During the winter months our bird friends need high energy foods containing a higher fat content. They need to increase and maintain their fat reserves throughout this harsh period. At the end of Autumn and at the beginning of winter, baby birds will love mealworms and sunflower seeds.
If they can find a sustained source of these, they will really flourish. I recommend using fat balls and suet pellets when it is really cold. It is so easy to make your own and if you have children they really like getting involved then watching the result afterwards.
One of the most popular feeding items in my garden is the coconut half filled with a suet-based food. The only problem I find is they are easily dominated by larger birds, such as Magpies and Starlings.
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