Has anyone got any tips on where to buy bird food for wild visiting garden birds?

ripongrammargirl

Best and cheapest place I have ever found for bird food is Twootz.com. They are next day (or day after) delivery via DPD and sell everything you could want for birds. Mealworms, different flavours of suet pellets and peanut butter are the favourites with our birds and the nightly fox is also partial! Delivery is free over £9.95 but as they sell larger (and smaller) quantities it’s easier and cheaper to buy in bulk. You also get loyalty points for reviewing every item you buy which equates to money off. They also reward for wildlife photos that you take with little stories about them. It’s a very good company and the couple of times I’ve had a problem they respond very fast and resolve it usually with more products or points. 

I also recommend getting No Mess bird seed or you will have all sorts of weird plants growing from them anywhere they take hold!
Enjoy your feathered friends and don’t forget to put out fresh drinking water and bath water.

desperate_saver

I feed my garden birds with Sunflower hearts only and have a wide variety of birds; gold finches, nuthatches, blue tit, great tits, coal tits, redpolls, bramblings, redwings, green finches and my daily woodpecker. I also have a family of mice who live in the wall under the feeder and scurry about feeding on the dropped hearts. 
I buy in bulk a 20kg bag usually from a seller on ebay and pay around £21 for 20kg, the price has increased recently. That lasts me about 7 weeks but brings me great pleasure.

zozie1

I get my sunflower hearts, insect suet pellets, and fat balls from garden wildlife direct. Very competitive, good loyalty system, free quick delivery over 12.5kg. They sell everything, feeders, stations etc. Great customer service.

Pollycat

GBNI said:

Home Bargains do a 12.5kg bag of mixed bird seed for less than £5 I think it is! The only issue is it does have grains in it which will grow if the birds knock it out of your feeders and don't eat it. So depends on how fussy you are with your garden if you want to attract finches, you'll need to get nyger seed, they rarely eat 'normal' seed. It requires a different style feeder as well. 

We have at least a dozen goldfinches that visit us daily.

They are greedy little birds with the sunflower hearts. They just sit on the feeder perches and eat and eat, unlike tits who usually take one or two seeds and then fly off. We don't have a nyger feeder.

We have one feeder with mixed seed, the sparrows eat that, and 3 feeders with sunflower hearts which attracts the goldfinches and the odd greenfinch and chaffinch. And of course blue-tits, coal-tits and longtail-tits.

2 fat ball feeders on the back and one on the front.

I usually buy the 'ultimate' fat balls from Wilko in a tub of 30.

We refill that lot more than once a week.

I put mealworm and suet pellets out for blackbirds, robin etc because they struggle to manage the feeders.

We have a pair of collared doves who have mated in the tree in our front garden for a number of years and wood pigeons who pick up the seeds that have been dropped from the feeders.

It's a busy little garden, especially when the starlings descend on the fat balls. They are like noisy, squabbling schoolchildren.

TeddyG

We use mealworms and suet pellets (with insects, mealworms, or berries) on the ground and Honeyfields do an excellent seed mix (12.6 Kg) for feeders. Mealworms and pellets from eBay and seed from Costco (Members only outlet)

June_Liddy

I use 'Love Garden Birds' on line.  You get points and free delivery over £25 I think.

Bellisima

I find the food that really gets eaten are sunflower hearts and fat balls/fat trays as well as raisins and fresh fruit.  Those bags of mixed seed aren’t so popular.  We get the sunflower hearts either from Wilkos or Home Bargains.  Pet shops and garden centres are the most expensive.  Keep feeding throughout the year and keep feeders topped up.  This sometimes needs doing every day.   Water needs replacing daily too.   Welcome to the wonderful world of birds! 

Lynsey919

We spend a fortune on food for the birds.  They actually cost more to feed than our 2 big dogs!

We buy fat balls from Home Bargains or Wilkos as they are the cheapest.  We buy big bags of seed from Home Bargains too but occasionally online from Love Garden Birds as theirs is better quality although a fair bit dearer.  We also feed mealworms, peanuts, sunflower hearts and nyger seeds.  We recently bought a flutter butter feeder and are getting the refills from Amazon.

We got loads of birds in our garden which is lovely but they eat masses.  We were putting out 12 fat balls every day and they would eat them all (usually by lunchtime).  We now only put out 6 a day.

Do make sure you put out water for them to drink and bath in.  We have 2 of the largish plant pot saucers which I put fresh water in every day and they love to bathe in those.  We also have a small dish which I put fresh water in every day.  Also the water containers need to be washed out regularly as apparently birds can catch a disease if they are not

Rollypolybirch

Wilkinson’s have a really good selection of seeds and feeders, all reasonably priced. When Aldi have the bird seed in, their sunflower hearts are good value.

We get loads of goldfinches here, but they don’t look at the Niger seeds they like the sunflower hearts, in fact most of the birds prefer them, so I buy mostly those.

Pollycat

Not food but feeders...

you need to clean your feeders regularly.

I find the cheap £1.25 ones from Wilko are the easiest to clean, they come apart very easily.

I have a duplicate stock so I can put up full, clean feeders and then clean the ones I've taken down and put them away ready for next cleaning time.

The worst ones for cleaning are the Wilko squirrel proof ones with a cage round the feeder. They do not come apart at all.

I did buy some feeders with ceramic tops and bottoms from Aldi. They looked nice but were a bit of a faff to fill up. And I found the plastic tubes prone to splitting.