With these little fat balls your garden, your terrace, perhaps even your balcony can be transformed into a welcoming urban oasis. Here birds, in the cold of winter, will find a safe place to shelter and feed — perhaps surrounded by plants, hedges and shrubs to their liking.
A small urban oasis in which to shelter and feed. This is what our garden or terrace — and, on a smaller scale, even our balcony — can become for birds in winter. In this way we ensure the wellbeing of these little creatures, the continuity of the species, and — not least — we can enjoy a priceless natural spectacle for ourselves: educational, varied and full of surprises. By placing food in green areas or on the terrace, besides sparrows we may attract blackbirds, robins, tits, chaffinches, the noisy and voracious starlings and, depending on where you live, even the shyest of long-tailed tits and the reserved blackcaps.
Ideally, food should be placed up off the ground, not on it. This way the food will be out of reach of rodents and other opportunists, and the little birds will be safe from cats. Bear in mind that great tits, unlike blackbirds, sparrows and robins, do not feed on the ground but take food, wedge it between the branches of hedges, and eat it there — precisely to feel safe.
There are many ways to feed wild birds in winter. Dry bread is not particularly suitable — it is not nutritious, can give them a false sense of fullness or leave them short of water. On the other hand, little birds are very fond of seeds. Sunflower seeds are undoubtedly the most nutritious and are easy to find in the pet food aisle of the supermarket: a 500-gram bag costs just over one euro. Other types of seed mixes can be found cheaply at the supermarket or at garden centres, which, alongside a variety of seeds specifically for caged birds, also offer something for free-living birds. These are small bags of food, fat or seeds, ready-made and designed to be hung in the garden. You hook them onto the high branches of shrubs — perhaps right in front of the kitchen window, so you can watch what goes on from inside.
Here is how to make them at home: I am reproducing a guide developed with Alessandra Corbella for Diamoci la zampa and Gaia animali & ambiente.
Ingredients:
Optional ingredients:
Method:
Place all the ingredients except the margarine in a mixing bowl. Mix everything together to create as homogeneous a mixture as possible. Separately, place the margarine in a saucepan and heat it over a medium flame until completely melted. Pour the melted margarine over the mixture in the bowl. Mix everything together with a large spoon or by hand until the dough is as homogeneous as possible. With your hands, shape the mixture into small ball-shaped cakes (avoid pressing them too firmly together) and set them aside to cool.
How to use:
The little cakes should be given to birds in places inaccessible to dogs and cats, as they too find them appetising. They should ideally be placed on windowsills, on rooftops, or among the branches of trees. As soon as a robin or blue tit notices the treat, sparrows, starlings and blackbirds will not be far behind. On wintry days of snow or frost, providing this or other bird foods reduces or eliminates the mortality rate among small passerines, which over the course of a single winter can reach as high as 70 per cent of a single population.
Birds that feed on this food:
Blackbird, starling, great tit, blue tit, coal tit, robin, Italian sparrow, tree sparrow, chaffinch, greenfinch, white wagtail, Eurasian collared dove, great spotted woodpecker, green woodpecker, black redstart, magpie, jay.
In winter the garden rests, but it can always look vibrant and engaging if we make it welcoming for the small birds that can visit and bring it to life every day.
Hedges, flower beds, a shrub or perhaps a tree — every element of the garden can provide food in the form of berries, seeds and fruit, attract insects and invertebrates that birds feed on, and offer shelter and nesting spots.
Many plants attract birds to our gardens: Pyracantha hedges, Solanum capsicastrum (which produces highly decorative berries that are harmful to humans but irresistible to birds, which, after eating them, also helpfully disperse the tiny seeds far and wide), Nandina domestica (very popular with blackcaps), Viburnum tinus, Amelanchier, which produces countless berries, ivy, which also produces berries and whose tiny flowers are beforehand a destination for pollinating insects, which in turn attract birds; and also holly and all fruit trees. In reality you need not even seek out particular species, because even wild plants — those commonly referred to as "weeds" — produce seeds that birds find highly appealing.
Our cities, with their "climate dome", have a temperature at least a couple of degrees higher than woodlands and countryside, and attract many birds. By creating small oases, we can easily do some good for these small creatures, promoting urban biodiversity, enjoying the act of observation, and learning to understand and protect them.