Winter Bird Feeding Leads to Healthier Hatches

Here are tips for attracting birds to your feeders during winter.

Dawn and dusk are the best times to provide seed, when the birds are most likely foraging.

Beef kidney suet is a good source of fat. Woodpeckers and chickadees like suet.

Seeds and peanuts provide vitamin E. Cardinals, finches and grosbeak like seeds.

To avoid competition between suet-eaters and seed-eaters, do not mix the two foods.

Dried or frozen fruits attract mockingbirds, robins and waxwings.

Provide good cover near the feeder, with evergreen shrubs and other plants with prickly branches.

Attach a convenience perch to a feeder – a branch works best – to provide a spot for a bird to eat while other birds arrive for their meal.

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Many of us enjoy filling our backyard feeders in the winter and watching the birds come and go.

Now, a new study suggests that leaving feed through the winter will help birds raise bigger and healthier broods next spring!

The study from Britain and Ireland focuses on a European type of chickadee - the white-tailed version - but scientists say the findings likely apply to Canadian chickadees, cardinals and blue jays too.

Birds that had access to feeders laid the same number of eggs as those that had to find all their own food, the scientists found. But the human-fed birds laid eggs earlier, giving their babies a chance to fatten up before all the other bird families are hunting for food. Their young also grew up stronger and healthier. In the end, these families produced one more surviving young bird than the birds left on their own.

The United Kingdom’s winters are mild compared to Canada’s, where the colder climate means winter feeding would have a much more substantial effect, according to the study’s lead researcher, Stuart Bearhop of the University of Exeter.

What part of the food matters most? This remains a mystery.

It may be that the birds simply need calories, so anything with fat would do the trick, or perhaps the birds are receiving vitamins and minerals that aid in raising young, such as vitamin E, crucial in egg production and embryo development.

Peanuts and many seeds are rich in vitamin E.

The researchers are still trying to determine how much benefit comes from food and how much is simply due to some birds being better parents to begin with. It will be important to examine whether these results hold up over generations.

But in the meantime, enjoy your backyard winter feeders!

Story adapted from “Feed birds in winter for healthier hatch” by Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 5, 2008.