Help birds get through the winter

Our feathered friends bring movement and music to our urban sprawl, lighting up our wintry world with their quirky traits and beaky banter. A simple pleasure on a sunny wintry day is to step outside, cup of steaming tea in hand, and listen out for the songs from our garden birds.

Despite their brave mellifluous tunes, the blackbirds and robins can have a hard time of it. Bad weather can quickly drain birds’ energy reserves, and shorter days bring fewer opportunities for feeding, just at the time when regular meals are essential to stave off the cold.

Giving your garden birds extra food during the winter will dramatically improve their chances of survival to breed successfully in the spring. The wider the variety of food you can offer them, the more species you will attract. Focus on high-energy foods that top up those vital fat reserves.

Peanuts (the ones sold for birds) are a favourite with tits, nuthatches and greenfinches. Sunflower, millet and niger seeds are particularly rich in nutritious oil. Tiny black niger seeds poured into fine-meshed feeders or empty teasel heads are the cream of the crop for finches and siskins. Bruised apples, as well as apple cores and peel scattered on the ground, are welcomed by redwings and fieldfares, especially if their farmland diet of berries and worms has frozen up. A dish of dried or fresh mealworms is adored by robins and wrens.

Stale bread, cooked rice and pure lard or fat (never fat from a roast dinner) can be combined with flaked maize and sunflower seeds to make a tasty bird cake. These, along with fat balls (remove the mesh to prevent birds from trapping their feet), can be hung in trees.

Position the feeding stations in places where you can see them easily from the house but near enough to fences, trees and shrubs, where birds can perch. Check for predators such as cats before they move in to their buffet. Supply food regularly and, if possible, establish a routine so that ‘your’ birds know they can rely on a nutritious snack in your garden.

Birds can be messy eaters. Clear spilled feed off the ground every few days so that it does not go mouldy and spread disease, and throw away food that the birds do not eat.

Fresh water is just as essential as food, not only to drink but also to clean and fluff up plumage, which is the bird’s natural insulation. An old washing up bowl or plant pot saucer makes a good bird bath. Keep it topped up with fresh water every day to avoid ice forming.

Just five minutes’ bird watching can be very rewarding. The acrobats of the bird world are the tit family: great, coal, blue and, if you are lucky, the long-tailed tit, whose tail is as long as its body. These colourful birds will hang upside down on bird feeders as they peck at the nuts and seeds, then fly off as quickly as they arrived.

Source of food: A blackbird on a rowan tree

That large noisy gang of birds twittering in the shrubbery is probably a family or two of house sparrows, waiting to descend on the bird table and devour the scraps left by other birds.

Birds that are territorial at other times of the year will come together to feed in winter. You may be surprised to see several cock blackbirds in your garden at the same time; some of them will be natives, while others will have flown in from continental Europe, escaping the harsher weather there.

The BBOWT website has several pages of information about feeding garden birds, recipes for fat balls, and how to build and put up nest boxes.

Caring for birds during the winter is one way of encouraging them to stay in and around your garden, so you can enjoy watching them rear their broods when spring comes again.

For more advice on caring for garden birds go to the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) website – bbowt.org.uk/wildlife