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

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
Sign up for the Country Life Newsletter
Exquisite houses, the beauty of Nature, and how to get the most from your life, straight to your inbox.
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 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.
-
‘It had the air of an ex-rental, and that’s putting it politely’: How an antique dealer transformed a run-down Georgian house in Chatham Dockyards
An antique dealer with an eye for colour has rescued an 18th-century house from years of neglect with the help of the team at Mylands.
By Arabella Youens
-
A home cinema, tasteful interiors and 65 acres of private parkland hidden in an unassuming lodge in Kent
North Lodge near Tonbridge may seem relatively simple, but there is a lot more than what meets the eye.
By James Fisher