Look After Your Garden Birds This Winter

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     Winter is on its way and if you are feeling the cold then spare a thought for our garden birds. Attracting birds in to your garden through providing food and water offers a constant source of delight and is a wonderful way to introduce children to wildlife.

And during the colder months your supply of food can save their lives.

At this time of year we all need a few incentives to venture outside and what could be better than knowing we could be saving our tiny garden friends' lives?

In winter, birds find it hard to find their natural food such as insects, worms, berries and seeds.

They require high energy and high fat foods during the cold weather to maintain their body reserves to survive frosty nights.

Children can often be encouraged to help feed the birds as it is very easy to do and offers instant rewards - watch their faces when they peep through the window and see a robin tucking in to the food they've just left on the bird table.

In severe weather, feed twice daily if possible, in the morning and in the early afternoon.

When thinking what to feed them, you can buy bird cake and peanuts, which are very good because of their high-fat content and bird seed mixtures are also high in oils. But you can also feed kitchen scraps, such as fat and suet, and leftovers from the children's tea, like soft wholemeal bread, mild grated cheese, cooked potatoes, pastry and dried fruit, or even better, get the children to make their own bird cake to their own special recipe.

Recipe for Bird Cake

First make a mould from something suitable such as a coconut shell or an empty yoghurt pot or ice cream carton. Thread some string through the bottom of the coconut so that you can hang it up off the bird table or on to a tree and thread some wire through the pot or plastic container.

Ingredients:

500g fat (suet is best)

500g mixed bird seed plus up to 750g of scraps such as cake & biscuit crumbs, grated cheese, minced peanuts, sultanas, brown bread etc.

Method: 1. Carefully melt the fat in a large saucepan - don't make it too hot and ensure young children are always carefully supervised.

2. Stir all the rest of the ingredients into the fat.

3. Pour the mixture into the mould and leave to cool and set.

4. When the cake is set, hang the coconut mould upside down in the garden. Cake made in a yoghurt pot can be carefully scooped out using a knife, and hung up by the wire or simply turned out on to your bird table.

Then just watch the birds enjoy your feast! Birds that will love this cake include robins, nuthatches, sparrows, chaffinches, great tits and blue tits and you might even be lucky enough to catch a greater spotted woodpecker having a peck too. Remember that a constant supply of drinking water is just as important as food so crack the ice off the bird bath with some warm water from the kettle.

Other ways to look after your birds this coming winter include putting up nesting boxes and creating a natural, organic garden with native plants, shelter and places to perch.

Birds love untidy gardens so leave dead heads on plants so that the birds can pick out the seeds and leave some of the autumn leaves around for the birds to scratch around in, for bugs and insects.