Winter is coming.....cuisine for wildlife!

[Plot70]

Finches both gold and green are happy with sunflower hearts on my plot.
The tits like them too and we need tits to clear up the caterpillars later in the season when they have chicks.

[Containergardener]

Yer I put nyger too for goldfinches but they seem to prefer sunflower seeds. Maybe I should crush some up into nyger feeder.

[burnie]

Ideally once birds have young to feed, we should only put out feeders where whole large items cannot be taken away, I have stopped feeding now except for Nyger seed, which are tiny. An example is our feeders for the squirrels have whole nuts in, but the feeders are mesh or the box types have a lid on.

[Containergardener]

What about sunflower seeds?

[Containergardener]

Good point . I stopped peanuts in February.

[Nicos]

Good call burnie hadn’t thought about that....Thanks for the heads up.

[burnie]

With birds beginning to nest, make sure they cannot fly off with whole peanuts as they feed them to babies in the nest and the babies can choke and die, same with large lumps of bread. They need to be in mesh type feeders so the adults take only small particles.

[Nicos]

We ran out of our uk imported supply of peanuts a few weeks ago so got a supply of mixed peanuts with shelled sunflower seeds from Germany.( We’ve not found a supplier over here for large bags at discount prices)

We’ve had easily 50 goldfinches tucking into the feeders- with all the peanuts chucked onto the floor. We were about to change feeders fora mesh one but noticed we have a pheasant arriving at dawn for his breakfast ...peanuts!

Now we have no cockerel it’s lovely to hear ’ Philippe ‘ calling out. ( I wonder if he’ll be bringing a girlfriend along soon?)

We do have several mesh feeders and spotted a woodpecker on one of them a couple of days ago...fantastic eh?

[Containergardener]

What with the starlings too the food doesn't arf go down. The woodpeckers raid the fat cakes, the sunflower seeds go with the tits , nyger for the goldfinches is raided by teams of finches and then the pheasant arrives to clear up.

[burnie]

My lot have eaten a sack of peanuts a sack of sunflower seeds, half a sack of nyger seeds and almost 2 large tubs of fat balls, cost almost a £100, flippin' eating better than me lol.

[Nicos]

We are still getting through loads of peanuts every day.

[annie8]

Wow I love seeing them. We get the odd one but would love to see more. Had been hoping they would come for the Niger seeds I’ve been putting in the feeder.

[burnie]

With more cold weather and snow forecast, the wildlife still needs a helping hand, we had over a dozen Goldfinches in the garden this morning, stunning little birds.

[annie8]

Put out some blueberries the other day and today some pumpkin and seeds which all seems to go down well with the blackbirds and thrushes particularly.

[Plot70]

I have a single seed feeder to keep the small birds on the plot. I figure that they take more pests if I leave it at that.
They take a decent amount of caterpillars that way.
I get finches tits and sparrows.
There is a robin about too.