Feeding and Supporting Birds All Year Round

Few topics divide garden lovers as reliably as the question of whether to feed birds, and if so, when. Some hang up the fat-ball net at the first frost and take it down again in March. Others feed all year round, on principle. And a third group says: skip the feeder, plant shrubs that bear berries on their own. All three have a point. The best garden for birds combines both: a clean feeding station in winter and a living pantry of wild shrubs that bears fruit from summer well into late winter.

The Feeding Debate, Short and Honest

For decades the iron rule was: feed only during frost and closed snow cover, and stop again promptly in spring. The worry behind it was that birds would "unlearn" how to find food on their own.

The ornithologist Peter Berthold shook that rule. His argument: our landscape has been cleared so thoroughly, hedges and wild herbs have grown so scarce, that year-round feeding simply helps many species, including during the exhausting breeding season. Conservation groups take a more cautious view and stress that feeding only ever reaches a handful of common species, while the real crisis, the collapse of insect populations and the loss of habitat, isn't solved by it.

Both sides meet at one point: clean, appropriate food from a hygienic dispenser does birds no harm. Whether you feed only in winter or all year is ultimately your choice. More important than the when is the how, and more important still is what grows in your garden on its own.

Winter Food That Earns Its Name

If you feed, do it properly. The most common source of error isn't the wrong food but the filth. In the classic open feeder, birds walk through the food, defecate in it, and in damp conditions pathogens multiply. Salmonella and the parasite that causes trichomonosis, which hits greenfinches especially hard, spread exactly there.

So use a feeding column (silo), from which the seeds slide down cleanly without the birds climbing in. Hang it in the open and cat-safe, at least two metres from dense cover, but with an escape bush nearby.

The Pantry of Berry Shrubs

Here lies the real treasure. A feeder supplies a few species for a few weeks. A well-planned belt of shrubs feeds from July into February, costs you no work once planted, and offers nesting sites and insects on top. The art lies in staggering: different woody plants whose berries ripen one after another, so something is always hanging.

The rowan is the classic among bird-feeding woody plants; not for nothing is it also called mountain-ash. Its orange-red clusters ripen from August and often last into winter, when waxwings sweep in from the north and strip a tree in an hour. For humans the raw berries are indigestible; for more than 60 bird species they are a feast.

The black elder bears glossy black berries from late August that blackbirds, blackcaps, and starlings love. It grows fast, tolerates pruning, and fits even smaller gardens if you coppice it regularly.

The hawthorn is a triple talent: dense, thorny branches as a safe nesting site, a cloud of blossom for insects in May, and red fruits from September for thrushes and hawfinches. As a hedge it's hard to beat, and its berries hang on as a winter reserve for a long time.

The sea buckthorn brings colour and vitamin C to late autumn. Its bright orange berries hang into winter and are emergency rations once everything else is gone. Note: sea buckthorn is dioecious, so you need a male and a female plant for fruit.

Then come the quiet helpers: the blackthorn bears blue fruits after the first frost and offers perfect shelter in its thorny thicket. The cornelian cherry flowers as early as March as one of the first insect pastures and bears red fruits from August. The privet delivers black berries into winter. And the rose hip of wild roses is a long-runner that often still glows in February.

One woody plant deserves special mention because it's almost always overlooked: the ivy. It flowers late in autumn, when hardly anything else does, and is then an insect magnet. Its berries don't ripen until early spring, March to April, exactly in the lean time before the first fresh green. No other plant closes that gap so well.

Whoever plants shrubs thinks in years, not weeks. Set wild woody plants in the dormant season, ideally from October to March, as long as there's no lasting frost. Bare-root stock is cheaper and often establishes better than container plants. Water regularly in the first summer; after that, native species mostly look after themselves. How to turn them into a dense, sheltering hedge is covered in the article Plant a Protective Bird Hedge from Wild Shrubs.

Summer Belongs to the Insects

Here lies the biggest misunderstanding. In spring and summer most garden birds don't eat seeds; they need protein for the brood. And that protein means caterpillars, aphids, beetles, spiders. Depending on the source, a pair of blue tits gathers 10,000 to 15,000 caterpillars and insects for a single brood. That's why the most important contribution in summer isn't the feeder but doing without insecticides.

Spent perennials are bird food too. Let sunflowers, teasels, stonecrop, and evening primrose stand over winter instead of clearing them in autumn. Goldfinches and greenfinches clamber through the seed heads, and the hollow stems give insects a winter shelter.

Water, All Year Round

Birds need water for drinking and for grooming their feathers, in the heat of high summer as much as in frost. A shallow dish with a rough bottom and a stone as a landing spot is enough. Set it up raised and in the open, so cats have no cover.

1. Choose shallow and non-slip

   Take a dish with no more than 5 to 8 cm of water depth and a rough surface. A flat plant-pot saucer works too.

2. Clean it daily

   Droppings and germs collect at the bath faster than at the feeder. Tip the water out every day and rinse the dish with hot water.

3. Refill more often in summer

   A lot evaporates in the heat. A second spot in the shade keeps the water fresh longer.

4. Keep it ice-free in winter

   Put the bath out fresh in the morning or swap out the ice. No antifreeze, ever. A dark dish thaws faster in the sun.

Don't Forget Nesting and Roosting Sites

Food and water are half the battle. The other half is safe places to breed and roost: dense hedges, ivy on the wall, an old tree with cavities, plus a few well-placed nest boxes. Cavity nesters like tits and nuthatches barely find natural nesting holes in tidy gardens anymore. How to mount, orient, and clean boxes properly is covered in the article Mounting and Cleaning Nest Boxes Correctly.