What do birds like?

[Neil Bromhall]

Birds will learn where regular food and water can be found. I'm starting to put out some general birdfeed containing fruit and seeds.

2007 has been a good year for fruit so there is plenty of natural food around, yet I want the birds to learn that food and fresh water can be found in my garden when the weather turns.

Two friends of mine living just outside Oxford said that the best to use are Sunflower seeds. I thought their comments were interesting and so I'm curious to hear what you think birds like from around the country and what type of food attracts which birds.

[Miranda]

We feed all year round and use a mix called 'no mess' (Buckton's Premium Wild Bird Food) which is a mix of shelled larger seeds with a lot of smaller seeds in with it. That comes in 20kg bags, which is a cheaper way of buying, about £10-11. We add in some black sunflower seeds (12.5kg bags, for about £8) still in their shells as the finches seem to enjoy fiddling them open. Those two attract many small song birds - finches, tits, sparrows and the robin. At this time of year, yellowhammers generally show up and they are a delight to see, with their wonderful yellow plumage. The larger birds - blackbirds, thrushes, doves and wood pigeons - tend to eat from the stuff that drops to the ground.

For other food, I put out any apple/pear/banana that's gone wrinkly. Sometimes you can get them reduced in the supermarket. Those always go very quickly and are eaten by blackbirds. I slice the apples and put them about because the birds will fight over them. They'll often get hold of a piece and take it under a table or a shrub and try to eat it with no one seeing them. The blackbirds also enjoy soaked sultanas.

Robins are supposed to enjoy cake, but we're not cake eaters, so they don't often get that from us. In spring, when they are nesting, I order live mealworms and put them out in little glass Crème brûlée dishes. Once the robins find them, they go very quickly indeed. The blackbirds go for them as well but, while the robin will take just one worm at a time, the blackbirds will cram as many into their beaks as they can, so they don't last long. Curiously, a blackbird can still sing when it has a beakful of worms. How do they do that?

This spring, I discovered a lot of vine weevil grubs in a pot, so I separated them from the compost and put them in the dish for the robin. In the time it took for me to go and tell my partner to come and see, they'd all been taken. I guess they're a rare treat - anyway, it felt like good revenge against the grubs for eating the roots of my Heuchera.

For water, there is the pond and two other dishes, one at ground level and the other about a foot from the ground. They are used very often - the robins and blackbirds seem to do the most washing, though we occasionally see tits and sparrows bathing. Sometimes there is a queue for the bath, which can be very comical and we recently saw a blackbird trying to bathe whilst being harried by a chaffinch, a dunnock and a sparrow. The sparrow circled the dish constantly, jumping up and down, and kept trying to get in with the blackbird, who didn't care for that at all and seemed very much annoyed.

All in all, it's generally pretty busy out there - the birds are wonderfully entertaining and we enjoy watching them, while knowing that they have plenty to eat.

[sue1002]

I put out mixed wild bird seed all year round in feeders and on the bird table which gets eaten by bluetits and sparrows, any that gets left on the table is soon eaten up by collared doves.

During the summer I use the ready made fat balls and in the winter I make my own using lard and the seed which the starlings love, they make a right racket while they are fighting over them. Sometimes I add porridge oats and/or sultanas or raisins and these are greatly appreciated.

It's interesting to know that robins like cake, which is always around here and the homemade ones get eaten (by son and OH) so much more quickly than shop bought ones, I will put some out tomorrow and see how long it lasts.