Mary Allen
Wild birds find it difficult to find food, especially in winter. With the right food, you can help them through the cold season.
Which bird food is particularly important in winter and which special features are there with regard to the bird species?
What is Fatty Food and Why is It so Important?
The fatty feed provides birds such as titmice and tree sparrows with a particularly large amount of energy in winter. Tit balls and greasy litter for hanging up and for feeding with a feed silo or in the bird feeder are available in stores. If you want to make the fatty food yourself, you heat a mixture of tallow, oatmeal, berries, and wheat bran. Shape the mixture into dumplings or pour the mixture into a flower pot. A branch stuck through the hole in the bottom serves as a pole and makes it easier for the birds to eat. Hang the food in the shade so it doesn’t melt in the sun.
Which Grain Mixtures are Suitable in Winter?
Their hard beak turns birds like chaffinches and bullfinches into real grain-eaters. You are looking forward to a grain mix of sunflower seeds, hemp seeds, and oat flakes. Chopped nuts and broken nuts provide a lot of energy because of their high-fat content, but may only be fed natural and unseasoned. Grain, linseed, and poppy seeds are also suitable as grain feed. Grain eaters especially like to fly to a birdhouse or a feeder. Clean the bird feeder regularly to keep the feed fresh and clean. Do you want to build a bird feeder yourself?
Soft Food for the Cold Days
Thrushes, robins, and blackbirds are some of the birds that like to forage near the ground. You can offer them apples, raisins, oat flakes, or bran as a suitable soft food. Prepare the food in special feeding columns. If sprinkled directly on the ground, it can spoil and attract rats. Never feed breadcrumbs because bread swells uncomfortably in the bird’s stomach.
If you set up a bird feeder, you will need to fill it up regularly, as wild birds quickly rely on this source of food.
And use the time now in winter to put up nesting boxes. They should hang on trees or house walls at a height of a good two meters and be safe from predators. The optimal orientation of the entrance hole is east or southeast.
You should keep this in mind when feeding in winter:
- Avoid feeding leftovers – salted foods are dangerous for wild birds.
- Use species-appropriate food and mix the varieties to offer the right one for every bird species.
- Avoid large feeding stations as diseases can spread quickly here.
- Set up several feed hoppers and small birdhouses.
- Clean the floor around the feeding and watering points daily.
- Remember to offer the birds fresh water every day.
Fun Fact: Why Don’t Wild Birds Get Cold Feet?
They are simply well-armed: While their body temperature is around 40 degrees Celsius, it keeps falling downwards, so that it is around five degrees on the lower leg and can even be below one degree Celsius on the soles of the feet. Exchange of heat takes place in the legs so that the warm blood from the feet flows into the body and the warm blood is cooled from the body before it reaches the feet. So the wild birds do not get cold feet because they already have cold feet.
Other methods of combating the cold include pulling in the head and fluffing it up: it is not without reason that the robin looks like a small ball in winter. The great spotted woodpecker has adapted and pecks a cave in the thermal insulation of house facades. Nest boxes or tree hollows are also popular as sleeping quarters used. On a cold night, wild birds lose up to ten percent of their body weight to keep warm.