The ONLY Food you need to attract Birds to your garden.

Good morning and welcome to Paul T's world. In this video we're going to look at how to feed the birds in the winter. Feeding the birds in winter really attracts them into the garden. It's exciting, you never quite know what's going to arrive next. There will be the obvious birds that you know inhabit your garden but then every now and again a special bird comes in and that's part of the joy. So let's just have a look at what I feed the birds and first of all I've shown you a lot this last few years the birds coming to the feeder with the fat balls with little bits of seeds in, mixed up, it's fairly soft. All the birds like the fat balls, the sparrows come, obviously all the blue tits, coal tits, great tits, long tail tits, we've had a lot of long tail tits this year and they are mainly in the garden because of the food that I put out for them. There's a mix here, this is called a seed mix of different kinds of seeds in here. Of course we have the mealworms, you can actually have live or dried mealworms. I have the dried mealworms, I just gently soak them for 15 minutes in lukewarm water and lots of birds like this. You'll remember earlier on in the year I did some photography out in the garden and one of the first birds to come was the jay, that jay came because of these mealworms. Later on it started eating fat balls and got a taste for the fat balls but the mealworms can bring in all sorts of different birds and our lovely British robin loves mealworms. We have more suet here, this is in half a coconut. Now we're not feeding the birds coconut, it's purely the container and we do that a lot in in Britain of putting suet in half a coconut. Obviously the coconut already has its hanger, I actually take this off and I put a metal hook through here and of course we have the sunflower hearts. This is the main food I use. Some sunflower seeds still have their husks on, they can be the black ones or indeed the black and white striped ones. I don't use those because the birds discard the husk and you end up with a little bit of a mess of husk at the end of the day, whereas with these sunflower hearts the birds eat all of the sunflower heart. So you might ask which is the best? Some of you, particularly people who are feeding for the first time, are not going to be wanting to put out four different feeds for the birds and I wouldn't recommend that. First of all you've got to start getting the birds used to coming to your garden knowing there's some food there and what I would do is number one, get some sunflower hearts. Virtually all birds will eat sunflower hearts. Fat balls are a good staple as well, so if you're just feeding with one food get the hearts and if you want to mix it up and see what comes in the garden also get some fat balls or a suet log or indeed half a coconut, hang half a coconut from a and I am going to experiment with this seed mix. This is not a sponsored video however I buy all my food from a company called Bryn Vale and I've been buying from Bryn Vale online, I just order online, the food comes the next day and I've been doing that for five or six years. Very convenient, all they do is sell bird food, the quality is fantastic, the birds will eat all this with no waste. I contacted Bryn Vale telling them I was going to do a video on feeding the birds and they very generously actually sent me some extra food that I could demonstrate to you. When I order online with Bryn Vale, if you spend over I think it's 20 pounds, delivery is free, they always include an extra little something as a bonus over and above what you've ordered, which is quite nice. So if you register with the company so they know who you are each time you order they actually give you points for every order and points make prizes. They give you points with every order and those points add up and once you have I don't know 100 points or 200 points you can then choose some extra fat balls for free or maybe half a coconut. Oh that beautiful winter sunshine just coming across the garden, isn't that lovely? What's really great about feeding the birds is that the extra species and the extra number of birds that come in the garden is fabulous. Over this summer you've seen the long-tailed tits they've featured in a lot of the videos, they are all the youngsters from this last spring. It's the first time I fed properly right the way through the spring and the summer and it has rewarded me so much because the adults brought in those chicks, the chaffinches, the green finches, the jays, the woodpecker even and particularly the long-tailed tits, all those were youngsters from this spring. The adults brought them into my garden and showed them where the food was and you know they've come back right up until today and they will still come. They know that there's always going to be food in Paul T's world and they come to rely on it so if you do start feeding the birds just make sure that you continue to feed the birds. Can you hear that robin singing? Isn't that lovely? Now the robins are in the garden all the time, I have what, oh it's just gorgeous that robin singing. I could just sit here all day, I could just stand here all day and listen to these robins and the dunnocks, they have started singing as well. The blackbirds not so much so, the blackbirds have taken a little bit of a breather but come, oh what, February, March, the blackbirds will be singing as well. The blackbirds have been feeding on the fat balls, not so much the sunflower hearts. They love the apples that I have down at the base of the apple tree. I've saved some of the windfalls through the autumn and so there are apples to be put out slowly as the birds eat them. That robin's getting louder and louder and the field fairs will come often in the winter, a field fair comes and that field fair wants the apples. I have the bullfinches, they love the sunflower hearts. All the tit family, the blue tits, the coal tits, the long-tailed tits, they all like the fat balls, however all of them, except the long-tailed tits, like the sunflower hearts as well. Robin will do anything for a mealworm, particularly when they have chicks and it's when they have chicks that you can actually get the robins to come and take the mealworms from your hand. So I really want to encourage you to feed the birds but you have to choose an appropriate place to put the bird food. Now when you start putting bird food out, if you haven't done it before, you have to be patient, you have to be really patient. Those birds will not suddenly come to the garden and start feeding on the food. They have to get used to it, they have to realize it's there, and sometimes you'll have some of the more confident birds, maybe a robin will come to the sunflower hearts. The other birds will notice this, see what the robin does, and they will do the same. And once you have one or two birds coming, then the rest will start coming, but do be patient and do make sure that the food stays fresh. Now you'll notice that I haven't mentioned peanuts. Peanuts actually is a good food and is excellent and it's the traditional food that we feed our birds in Britain. However now sunflower hearts, seed food mixers, suet and the fat have taken over. Peanuts have really high fat value and are excellent for birds. The only thing is you need to have a feeder that's got a small mesh so the birds have to pick small pieces of the peanut because otherwise they can choke and you don't really want to be feeding peanuts in the spring when there are young birds about, because we don't want adult birds feeding the youngsters with peanuts. So let's have a look at where we put the bird food and what we put the bird food in. Let's look at the feeders. There are any number of receptacles feeders for the fat balls. This is one that I use, can just about fit three in that one and there we are and then we just hang that up in appropriate place that I'll talk about in a minute. Mealworms, I simply put some in a small container, this little terrine is fine. You've seen many of the birds eating from this, you can put them in a tray or indeed put them on the ground and then I just put a little bit water in, say something like that. Leave that for 15 minutes, just let the moisture be soaked up by the dried mealworms and then that's a lovely, that's a fabulous food for adults and chicks. You don't want to leave them too much in the water because you don't want them to go soggy, so after about 15 minutes what I might do is just take some of the water out, just hung that fat ball up on the tree literally this second. I'm filming here, I've just hung them up and the long-tailed tits have come straight down to them there. Isn't that fabulous? I'm just standing quite quietly about seven or eight feet from them, they're quite used to me now. One has gone over to the coconut, oh he's flown off now. The birds are waiting for me to finish this video, I can see birds flying around, where are they? There they are, they're waiting for me to finish, well they're not waiting for me to finish the video are they? They've decided they want the food right now, they're not interested in YouTube videos, they're interested in having some fat ball right now. See if I can find any others, they come in the apple tree. All the birds seem to travel around together so this blue tit will travel around with the long-tailed tits. Now chaffinches, I can see there's a chaffinch in the apple tree right now and he's come along as well. I say he, there are two or three males and three or four females. Let's just have a look to see what other birds are around, oh there we are, we've got a dunnock right there. Now the dunnock is one of the very very few birds that don't actually come onto the fat balls, they will come on the ground and scavenge whatever other birds have knocked off the fat balls or indeed the sunflower hearts. Now can you see his beak? He's got a thin beak if you can make that out, so he's more of an insect eater. If you have birds with thin beaks it's more for insects, then you have the finches with thicker beaks and they like the seeds. Right so now the birds have, they've gone, okay, so there was a little flurry and they'll be back again in another hour or so, so we can carry on with the video. Brinvale have very kindly sent me two of their most popular feeders and these feeders will be ideal for the seed mix and for the sunflower hearts. So let's have a look at the feeders, obviously you hang them up here, just lift that up to put the food in, very sturdy, I think it's metal. These are squirrel proof, what I mean by squirrel proof is the squirrels will not destroy this at all. Squirrels will get to it of course and they'll get the food inside and they'll swing about on them, but they will not destroy or damage this feeder at all. Now what I like about this feeder, it has a thread here, so if you have some kind of pole with a thread on top, you could actually have this screwed to the top of a pole with that thread and the other thing that's even more important, I don't know whether you can see here, but you can actually take this apart, there's a little screw there, unscrew that and this will slip right out so you can clean these, because you do want to clean the feeders fairly regularly because there's an extra number of birds here and there can be bacteria and the such like, so always best to clean them. This is obviously a larger one, I'll tell you what bird absolutely adores these sunflower hearts and that's the green finchers and the gold finchers and once they come on here they will sit here and eat all day. This is a special mix that Bryn Vale have formulated, I can see all sorts of things in here and we'll see what birds, we'll do a little experiment and see what birds prefer this mix and what birds prefer the sunflower hearts. It looks a good mix this, all right so we'll pop that up, let's have a look at the larger one here, so with this larger one I will put sunflower hearts in, so as I say if you're only going to feed the birds one food I would recommend sunflower hearts, if you're going to feed the birds two foods, sunflower hearts and fat bulls and in a minute we'll have a look at where we should put these feeders, it's quite important where the feeders go. Let's see where we put these feeders, you want a place where the birds feel confident that they can rush back to safety at a moment's notice and away from predators. So as you know from all my videos I planted this area here so it's ideal with the trees and the bushes, so what the birds like to do is they sit there, check that the coast is clear and then dart out to feed on the coconuts or the seeds. So I hang the coconut there, I've just put the seed hopper there hanging from the apple tree and we've already got the fat bulls here and indeed I've only just put them up and as you saw we've already had plenty of birds feeding from it straight away, absolutely fabulous, it keeps the garden alive, helps the through the cold winter nights. It's not just food of course that birds need in the winter, they need water, birds keep warm by what's inside them but also the feathers and that's why birds preen and keep all their feathers in tip-top condition, if they don't they just won't keep warm and they need water for that, so they need water just as much in the winter as they do in the summer, so please put water out, clean water for them in the winter. So you'll see them having a bath in the cold freezing water, they do like it and then preen afterwards, we wouldn't exactly be doing that but they realize how important it is. So in the morning if your birdbath is frozen over, take the ice out and replenish it with clean fresh water. I've put a link to Bryn Vale down in the description below should you wish to try out their food, it's the food I always buy, I would like to thank Bryn Vale for sending some extra food and the two feeders to show you today. So if it's proved useful to you, please give the video a like, hey why not subscribe and see what I'm going to do next year in Paul T's world. Bye!