Buying Food For Wild Birds?

What is good food?

You can give the birds in your garden a helping hand by feeding them. But what is good food? Good and nutritious bird food consists of seeds, peanuts and fats. Table scraps are not suitable. These contain too much fat, salt and artificial colours and flavours.

Birds are allowed to eat this:

Scatter feed
Fruit
Unroasted and unsalted peanuts
Fatty products for garden birds
Breadcrumbs (in moderation, as they contain a lot of salt)
Insect and seed mixes
Preserved currants and sultanas

Prefer not to give these:

Products containing salt
Milk
Butter or margarine
Cooked leftovers
The quality of bird food varies

Cheap fat balls are made from waste products, such as old frying fat. Seed mixes are sometimes filled with ingredients that contain little nutrition. Think of grass seeds and lentils. These are of no use to birds. So always pay attention to the energy value on the packaging and check the oil content of seeds. That way, you can be sure you are buying something good.

Which bird eats what?

Birds like a varied menu. The more varied the food on offer, the more different species will visit your garden. Do you have plants or trees in your garden with berries and seeds? Then you will find that many birds will visit these as well.

Every bird has its own eating habits. Some love seeds and others like insects. So how do you please all the birds in your garden?

The 5 most common garden bird groups and their favourite foods:
Coal and blue tits love nuts and seeds. You can find these in all kinds of bird food. Think fat balls, scatter food, stuffed coconut or a wreath of bird food.

Wrens, dunnocks and robins love scatter food and mealworms. They like to eat sheltered, e.g. in the hedge or a bush.

Do you have lots of sparrows in your garden? Sparrows are fans of larger and chunkier food. Think of scatter food, sunflower seeds, peanut flakes and ordinary peanuts.

Blackbirds, song thrushes and starlings are happy with fruit. Put down some apples, they like that. Soaked currants, sultanas, peels and cores also do well. Want to make it easy on yourself? Then buy scatter food with fruit. These birds will enjoy feasting on this.

Woodpeckers, nuthatches and treecreepers are real peanut lovers. You will do them a big favour with peanut cakes, peanuts, fat balls or fat blocks. Fun fact is that these birds like to eat vertically. Take this into account by hanging up a peanut block. You can also put the food in a silo.

You can tell what a bird prefers to eat by the shape of its beak. The blackbird, for example, has a long pointed beak with which it is good at pulling earthworms out of the ground. The chaffinch, on the other hand, has a conical beak. This allows it to easily crack seeds and kernels.