We had heavy snow here in Caithness earlier in January, and we found ourselves snowed in for just over a week. Luckily we had enough food and fuel in the house, but the one thing I found myself running low on was bird food.
Every morning I was greeted by over 20 blackbirds all frantically trying to get my attention for breakfast. Once the food was out, they were joined by our resident rooks, robins, sparrows, wood pigeons and great tits. This was repeated all through the day until I realised by day 3, I was going to run out of food for them, and I was absolutely horrified.
There was no post getting through to us, so I couldn’t order anything online. Our tiny village shop doesn’t sell bird food, and couldn’t get any human food deliveries anyway. It was running low on basics like bread, so I didn’t want to make things worse for other people by buying food there.
So I turned to the internet and asked for advice about what human food is safe to feed to garden birds, and it was a very interesting week!
My major discovery was that porridge oat flakes, with a little vegetable or sunflower oil stirred into it, was the most popular food by far, better than commercial bird food. I’m going to carry on feeding this to garden birds as it’s such good value, and is gobbled up by every bird visitor to the garden. I was filling up a large mug with porridge oats and stirring around a tablespoon in.
Cooked plain pasta (no salt) was very popular with the rooks. So was cooked plain brown rice, again with no salt.
Cooked frozen peas, slightly crushed, went down well with everyone.
Grated carrots were the favourites with the starlings.
I had a bag of dried chickpeas which had been sitting at the back of the cupboard for about a year and I finally got myself organised enough to look up how to cook these in a pressure cooker. It was so easy, I should have done this months ago! Cooked chickpeas, slightly crushed, were gobbled up by everyone. And as a bonus I made myself a huge batch of hummus which was a million times nicer than shop-bought.
The blackbirds also liked cat food, although not the fish variety.
I thought I would share this info in case anyone finds it useful. Porridge oats are really worth trying - maybe with the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch coming up it could be time to treat the birds on your patch to something a little different? Let me know if you have any other suggestions for home-made bird food, I would love to hear them!