Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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Perfect Cold Weather Foods For Your Birds

As colder temperatures set in, the greatest challenge for our non-migrating birds is staying warm. In order to keep warm, birds must consume large amounts of calories, which are then metabolized to provide energy and body heat. Small song birds eat continuously during the short daylight hours of winter to maintain their body temperature. At night, birds lower their body temperature to conserve energy. Most birds fill their crops with food before nightfall to keep up their caloric intake during the night. It's obvious that the availability of food has a lot to do with a bird's chances of survival during winter, when berries, insects and seeds are in short supply.

We can help birds endure long, cold winters by providing high quality foods that contain lots of oils and fats for birds to quickly convert to energy and heat. These are our top picks for the best winter foods for wild birds:

Suet: Birds have a very high fat requirement during winter and are known to pick at animal carcasses in order to get it—so it's essential to provide suet for winter birds. Suet is raw beef fat, or sometimes mutton fat, taken from around the kidneys of the animal. Raw suet can often be found in supermarkets or butcher shops. Raw suet tends to go rancid quickly in hot temperatures, but it is great for winter feeding. Commercially sold suet contains rendered suet. This means that the suet has been melted down and the solids removed so it doesn't go rancid as quickly. Packaged suet is available as cakes, balls and suet plugs and is convenient to use. Suet can be offered in basket type feeders, suet ball feeders and in suet logs. Most are mixed with some type of seeds, corn, peanuts, insects or even fruit bits.

Black oil sunflower seeds: All song birds love black oil sunflower seeds! The shell is thin and easy for a small bird to crack open—and the center hearts are large and full of oils and protein. Black oil sunflower seed, sunflower hearts and sunflower chips should be a year round staple for your wild birds.

Peanuts and Nuts: Peanut butter, shelled peanut halves, whole peanuts and peanut bits are well liked by most winter birds and provide lots of protein, oils and fats. Peanuts sold for birds are raw peanuts, which also tend to go rancid in hot temperatures because of the high oil content. However, they are an excellent winter food. You can also find seed mixes that have proportionately large quantities of other nuts which are also great for winter feeding. These are generally called tree nuts and can include pecans, cashews, walnuts, hazel nuts, or any other nuts that were harvested abundantly during a given season.

Corn and Seed mixes: Corn is well known as a heat producing vegetable. Loved by doves, crows, blackbirds and jays, it will also be taken in small amounts by other birds such as nuthatches and titmice. The best way to offer corn for songbirds is finely cracked, rather than whole kernels which are too large and hard for them to digest. Many prepared mixes contain finely cracked corn which is an excellent way to offer it. Be sure you are offering a high quality blend and look for mixes with high amounts of black oil sunflower seed, nuts, millet and corn and lesser amounts of wheat, milo and canary seed (filler seeds).

Nyjer Seed: Extremely rich in oils, Nyjer seed is loved by goldfinches, siskins and redpolls and is most often fed in its own Nyjer Feeder due to its tiny size. When mixed in small quantities with other seeds, Nyjer can be fed in any style feeder--and other birds can also help themselves to this valuable seed. Nyjer is sometimes confused with North American thistle seed—a plant also sought out by finches. But Nyjer is an imported seed with a flower resembling a yellow daisy, and not the purple orb of the prickly thistle plant. Being a non-native plant, Nyjer seed is sterilized by heat treating when it enters this country to prevent it from competing with native plants. You can feed Nyjer seed with no fear of growing a garden of prickly thistle plants in spring!