Make It A Merry Christmas For Garden Birds

Don’t forget your feathered friends this festive season – and beyond. Val Bourne reveals the best ways to help them through the cold days and long nights of the winter months.

- Val Bourne

It may be the season of overindulgence for humans, but at Christmas and New Year – just like the rest of winter – your garden birds are struggling because their food is in short supply and so is daylight. Fortunately, there are lots of things we, as gardeners, can do to help.

Setting up some bird feeders stocked with peanuts and sunflower seeds can be surprisingly rewarding. Just recently I watched blue tits, great tits, coal tits, nuthatches and a male great spotted woodpecker polishing off lots of peanuts. My goldfinches prefer black sunflower seeds and they take up position and feed for several minutes at a time, although they’re not keen on nyger seeds (these come from thistles and need a different kind of feeder with narrow slits).

Wrens tend to be shyer and, although there are three or four around, they never come near my feeders. Instead, they forage in the autumn border, among the seed heads and stems.