Bird food: what to feed birds

Birds have favourite foods, so to maximise your chances of keeping your bird table well-populated, here’s what’s to offer the most common garden birds

Country Life's avatar
By
published
in News

Blackbirds: fruit (especially berries and apples), peanuts, cheese. They can also be tempted with soaked dried fruits

House sparrows: mealworms in the breeding season; you can also feed them sunflower hearts and seed mixes

Song Thrushes: fruit (particularly raisins, sultanas and currants) and peanut granules

Starlings: kitchen scraps, peanuts, fat blocks and seed mixes

Blue Tits: fat blocks, sunflower hearts, seed mixes and unsalted bacon

Chaffinches: peanuts, sunflowers hearts and seeds

Robins: mealworms, waxworms, peanut granules, sunflower hearts and pinhead oats. They will also eat small pieces of over-ripe and dried, chopped fruits

Goldfinches: Nyjer seeds

Wrens: suet and grated mild cheese

For more information about what to feed birds, and what you shouldn't give garden birds, visit: the RSPB's information site.

Country Life
Country Life

Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.

Latest