Topic hub

Bird Food and Seed

One seed feeds more North American backyard birds than every bargain mix on the shelf combined. Start there, then add foods for the birds it misses.

Start with black oil sunflower. It feeds cardinals, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, finches, grosbeaks, jays and small woodpeckers, it flows through any feeder, and its thin shell is one of the few seeds a small bill can open. Everything else in this section is a supplement to it or a targeted tool for one situation.

The corresponding mistake is a bargain mix. A bag that is half milo, wheat and red millet costs about twice its shelf price per pound of food that gets eaten, because birds rake the filler out to reach the sunflower and the rest rots on the ground below. Read bird seed mixes once and you will never buy a bad bag again.

Which food brings which bird#

If you would rather work backward from a species, the bird food chart lists what each common backyard bird will cross a yard for and what it merely accepts.

What to skip#

Four ingredients account for most of the waste in North American backyards: milo (sorghum), wheat, oats and red millet. They are cheap to grow and heavy in the bag, which is exactly why they are in the mix. Most eastern feeder birds leave all four on the ground, though ground doves and quail in the Southwest do take milo, which is the one honest exception.

Then there is the list that is not merely wasteful but harmful: bread, salted nuts, chocolate, avocado, milk and cooking grease. What not to feed birds explains why each one matters, and moldy seed heads that list.

Buying it and keeping it good#

Buy quantities you will use in about a month, not the largest sack in the store. Seed does not have an expiry date so much as a decline curve: fat oxidizes, the smell turns from faintly nutty to like old paint, and birds detect it long before you do. A full feeder that has gone quiet is a stale seed problem more often than anything else.

Decant into a metal or rigid plastic container with a latching lid, keep it cool and out of the sun, and never store the paper sack in a shed where rodents and pantry moths will find it. Storing bird seed covers the details, and no-mess and hull-free blends is worth reading if the shells under your feeder are killing the grass.

Two extras are worth knowing about. Grit and calcium matters in nesting season, when females need shell material. And homemade suet recipes will save real money if you go through several cakes a month in winter.

Where to go next#

Once the food is right, the two remaining variables are the feeder and its position. The bird feeder types section matches designs to species, and feeder placement covers the distances from cover and glass that decide whether your seed gets found at all.

If a specific bird is the goal, the attracting guides start from the species and work back to the food. If the seed is disappearing faster than birds could eat it, that is a job for problems and pests. And if seed is going bad in the feeder rather than in the bag, the answer is usually cleaning frequency, covered in cleaning, health and safety.

All 23 guides in this section#