Offering kitchen scraps can help attract birds into your yard. Some items to offer could include:
Avoid dairy products like milk as birds are lactose intolerant. Also avoid offering whole peanuts or any dry food that could potentially swell up their gut after ingestion, and never place out spoiled or mouldy food that could host bacteria that is toxic for birds.
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Stale Bread and Pastry
As birds can sometimes be lactose intolerant, leaving out stale bread, crackers, cookies and cakes is safe for birds. Be wary of offering anything salted or glazed. Leftover pasta and rice should also be offered, plain pasta preferable as cheese may cause problems as birds are lactose intolerant.
However, bread products should not be fed regularly to your bird as they contain little in terms of nutrients and vitamins that would benefit him/her, potentially leading to health problems like botulism and angel wing deformities that prevents him/her from hunting and eventually leads to starvation.
Stale Cheese
Birds are lactose intolerant and may experience stomach upset after consuming too much dairy products, including cheese. Luckily, cheese’s fermentation process removes lactose to make it safe for birds; variety of hard cheeses like mozzarella, feta, cheddar and parmesan should be fine as choices for consumption by birds; though any with flavoring or rancid cheeses could harm them instead.
Always ensure the cheese you feed to wild birds is finely sliced or grated – they have very small beaks, making it hard for them to break into block cheese. Furthermore, shaker parmesan contains too much dairy which could harm birds.
Cooked Pasta or Rice
Kitchen foods that can be fed to wild birds include cooked pasta and rice; however, these should not replace their normal diet of seeds and grains.
Cooked rice and pasta can provide a healthy source of carbohydrates to fuel energy levels, but should remain plain without being covered in sauce.
Cooked beans provide important nutrition for birds. However, raw beans contain lectins which interfere with their digestive systems and should therefore not be fed directly to birds.
Unsalted Nuts
Stale nuts or peanuts (especially leftover from cooking) are popular kitchen food that birds love to snack on, yet these products may become infected with aspergillosis, which is potentially lethal to birds.
Woodpeckers, chickadees and jays love eating nuts because their unsalvaged oils contain essential vitamins and nutrients essential for their survival. Woodpeckers particularly enjoy munching away at them.
Offer unsalted nuts or pieces as part of a bird seed blend designed to attract those species, as well as providing feeders with sunflower, nyjer or other good bird seeds that attract most bird species.
Unsalted Meat
Birds love meat, but should only consume it sparingly and if it is unsalted. Consuming too much salted food could result in them developing an abnormally high salt level that leads to illness and even death.
Fruit seeds and pips may contain small traces of the cardiac-toxic chemical cyanide; thus it’s wise to remove these before feeding to wild birds. Also avoid offering high water content fruits like apples and pears.
Chocolate, tea and coffee grounds should not be fed to birds as they contain stimulants like theobromine and caffeine that can cause vomiting, diarrhoea and hyperactivity in birds – even fatal effects in large doses! Fish also should not be fed to them unless specifically designed to digest it.
Chopped Eggs
Egg shells provide birds with essential calcium for healthy skeletons and egg production. Some bird owners include these in their backyard feeders to maximize benefit for both bird health and egg production.
Cheese is another kitchen food that can be offered to wild birds as food for consumption. Small pieces of stale but non-spoiled cheese should be given in small doses to them.
All of these foods are safe for wild birds, but it may take them some time to become used to eating something new. Even though many birds will ignore new offerings at first, persevere – just continue offering food until eventually birds start accepting it and enjoying eating it.
Shelled Sunflower
Sunflower seeds are a go-to product in most feeders and highly sought after by bird species alike. Their thin shells make them easy for virtually every seed-eating bird to break open; black oil sunflower seeds are especially valued during winter due to their higher fat content and should therefore not be overlooked!
Sunflower seeds can be mixed with other kinds of seed to make them more accessible for small birds and ensure all species of birds receive enough protein-rich foods to ensure their survival.
Sunflower seeds can be distributed using different feeders such as tray, hopper and acrylic window feeders. Be wary of using tube feeders since these tend to collect moisture that could spoil their seeds.
