" Jeanne Stockdale" wrote in message
...

"ex WGS Hamm" wrote in message
news


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You are wrong I'm afraid. Animals and birds will scoff ultra fatty
stuff
or
salty stuff. Salt kills a bird very quickly. I keep parrots so am a bit
careful as to what I feed.(40+ expensive parrots). My sister once fed
her
beloved hens some avocado thinking she was giving them an expensive
treat.
She got up next day, opened the henhouse to find all her hens dead. Yes,
avocado is poisonous to most birds and animals. I once had a rescue dog
raid
the bin and eat avocado peelings and chewed the stone. I didn't realise
what
he had done until I found him comatose the next morning. Prompt and
expensive action from a vet saved him and it was only because I found
the
chewed stone and remains of peel that I knew what he had done.
Animals have no sixth sense as to what might kill them, especially in
deep
winter when they are starving and need vast amounts of food to survive.
The best things to put on a bird table are, sunflower seeds(cheap to
buy
and a source of fat to make calories to keep warm) suet ,ditto,unsalted
nuts, fruit and things like cooked vegetable scraps as long as they are
not
cooked with salt.
I admit to being a softy. I have 3 bird tables and buy a sack of
sunflower
seed, a smaller bag of peanuts, and a sack of budgie seed at the start
of
winer. I mix them together with some of the mixed corn I feed my
chickens
on. The 2 sacks will cost around £20 and the peanuts around a fiver.
This
little lot will feed the wild birds all winter plus some safe scraps. I
also
buy fat balls which you can get very cheaply from £1 shops and QD and
wilkinsons.
On my weekly trips to the abbatoir for bones for my 7 dogs, I also get
a
carrier bag of fat which I hang on tree branches. That attracts dozens
of
starlings and blue tits.
To be honest a sack of wild bird mix will only cost around £9 and if
you
only have one bird table, that plus a few dozen fat balls will feed
hundreds
of birds and help them survive until next spring. They will reward you
with
beautiful songs and hours of entertainment through your winter on a cold
winters day :0)


The birds in your area must be few and far between. Mine scoff about a
half
a hundredweight of peanuts every two months, summer and winter @ £15 per
sack.
They also get seed and pigeon mix.
Must admit that the woodpecker family does account for the consumption of
a
considerable proportion of the nuts.
Don't know much obout beautiful songs though - the collar doves tend to
have
the same effect as cocks crowing first thing in the morning with their
coo-coo-cooing.
I have plenty of wild birds here but as I am in a very rural area I expect
they get feed from other sources like spilled grain, cattle feed etc. As
well as stealing the chicken food, they get the leavings from the parrot
feed pots and other suitable scraps. Not many trees in the fens so I don't
see woodpeckers. I get a wide variety of finches, thrush,
blackbird,robin,wren, doves of all kinds, starlings, sparrows etc.