Feeding our beloved wild birds is becoming ever more popular as gardeners are now seeing the value in filling their feeders and setting up bird baths in their very own back yards. Using bird food is a great way to add life to your garden and also a great way to reduce the number of pests in your garden including slugs.
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- Bird in the Hand
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- Hungry Birds
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- feeding birds in winter
Winter time is always the best time to feed bird food to your wild birds, but the ideal thing to do is to provide a source of food throughout the whole year. This not only ensures that you get a regular flow of birds into your garden but it also ensures that our wild birds have a steady and stable food source that they can rely on.
In the Uk the average amount of money that is spent on wild bird over the course of the year is about 35.56€. In England more than sixty percent of the population are now feeding their garden birds with bird food while around twenty five percent of the population are providing a range of habitats such as bird houses, tables and nesting boxes.
With over 40% of all bird food sells occurring from the months of October to January it can be seen that the colder the weather gets the more likely we are to feed our birds. It certainly is great to see an increase in our appreciation of wild birds but we should continue to feed our birds all year round. This is for many reasons:
The summer days are longer and birds are more active: they therefore require more energy and food at this time of the year
On Average wild birds only get around 25% of the daily food requirement for bird food left out by gardeners
Some summer days are not as clement as we might wish and on these days birds can find it difficult to get to worms in the ground
There are many more birds in the Ireland during the summer months and that is a lot of little beaks to feed
Feeding birds during the summer months may not be as rewarding as feeding them in the winter. This is because of the abundant of natural bird food available to birds during the busy summer months. Between the months of March to September there is activity all over the garden with worms burrowing in the soil, snails working their way through vegetation and our wild birds busy feeding on the bounty that beholds them. Also, as the ground is never frozen in the summer months wild birds can rest assured that their food source is guaranteed during this period. This is why the less delicious but equally nutritious wild bird food is not gobbled up by the birds