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

clive0510

my mum believe it or not buys fresh bread (cheapest of the cheap-pun not intended!) to feed to the birds. I keep telling her not to feed them processed bread, but the more I tell her the more she does it.

Pollycat

clive0510 said:

my mum believe it or not buys fresh bread (cheapest of the cheap-pun not intended!) to feed to the birds. I keep telling her not to feed them processed bread, but the more I tell her the more she does it.

I'd stop telling her then.

According to RSPB:

All types of bread can be digested by birds, but ideally it should only be just one component in a varied diet. Bread does not contain the necessary protein and fat birds need from their diet, and so it can act as an empty filler. Although bread isn't harmful to birds, try not to offer it in large quantities, since its nutritional value is relatively low. A bird that is on a diet of predominantly, or only bread, can suffer from serious vitamin deficiencies, or starve.

Food left on the ground overnight can attract rats. Soaked bread is more easily ingested than stale dry bread, and brown bread is better than white. Crumbled bread is suitable in small quantities, but moisten if it is very dry. During the breeding season, make sure bread is crumbled into tiny pieces so that it is safer to eat. Dry chunks of bread will choke baby birds, and a chick on a diet of bread may not develop into a healthy fledgling.

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/how-you-can-help-birds/feeding-birds/safe-food-for-birds/household-scraps-for-birds/

Do they eat the bread?

A lot of gardens around us have seed feeders, fat balls etc out. I'm not sure the small birds would eat bread, although pigeons might.

One garden close to us has a fancy feeder with all sorts of things on offer.

They don't seem to get many birds, maybe because they don't have any plant cover in their garden.

Birds seem to love our garden, we have several feeders in an ornamental hawthorn, in a corkscrew hazel, in a large weigela.

Savvy_Sue

I won't NEED any more nyger seed from Little Peckers. What I spilt has started sprouting, better than anything I've tried to grow. I've been advised I need to get it out before it takes over completely. 

The birds, meanwhile, are completely ignoring both new feeder and old feeder in a different place. Sigh. I tried ... 

Pollycat

Savvy_Sue

We find they can be picky little oiks.

We have a mixed seed feeder and a sunflower hearts feeder in the same tree. Sometimes they don't touch the mixed seed for a few days then it seems to go all of a sudden.

I think you have to give them time to get used to new things & new places.

madlyn

Aldi, Wilko, Home Bargains or B & M all sell wild bird food.
I put out sunflower hearts, peanuts and mealworms.

Becket

I have spent a fortune on bird food (mainly on line) to feed my lot, mainly sparrows and other smaller birds but they throw so much out it was getting out of hand so I bought a cheap sack of bird food from B & M which had mainly large hard seed in it and what I did was grind it up in a coffee grinder I got from a charity shop and they love it and no more mess or weird plants growing everywhere!!!!!
It has saved me a lot of money and also the big boxes of 150 fat balls go down well too.

Juilet799

During freezing winter days, when small birds like blue tits and long-tailed tits spend up to 85% of the daytime feeding just to survive, high-quality fat products like suet pellets and fat balls will offer the highest supplementary heat supply. I usually buy them on Amazon, there are many varieties to choose from for the birds

Pollycat

We're being mobbed!

At least a dozen long-tailed tits fighting over the remnants of fat balls in the tree. Silly billies don't seem to realise that exactly the same fat balls are hanging on another tree, hardly touched.

Nice to see chaffinches visiting a little more.

KxMx

I have the same with two suet blocks. I can only assume something from their perspective is wrong with the second one. 

Savvy_Sue

I was thinking of this thread earlier, as we worked out how to stop the coconut halves from being swung round the branches by pesky squirrels and devoured in 24 hours, and replenished the fat balls. 

I also threw away half a feeder full of the black stuff which is supposed to attract finches and the like, moved it to a different tree and spoke sternly to the surrounding birds: this is their last chance, if they don't start visiting and eating the stuff then I'm not putting any more out. The sunflower hearts go slowly, but they do go. 

While we were doing that, there was a VERY noisy bird I could not see, no matter how hard I looked. Then DH spotted it, but I still couldn't. As I went to go indoors, he'd moved into the conifer - and it was a robin, framed in a small opening in the branches. A delightful picture, which I was unable to capture ...