Good morning and welcome to Paul T's World. In this video we're going to look at
how to feed the birds in the winter. Feeding the birds in winter really
attracts them into the garden. It's exciting, you never quite
know what's going to arrive next. There will be the obvious birds
that you know inhabit your garden But then every now and again a special
bird comes in and that's part of the joy. So let's just have a look
at what I feed the birds. ...and first of all, I've shown
you a lot this last few years the birds coming to the feeder with the fat balls. ...with little bits of seeds
in, mixed up - it's fairly soft all the birds like the fat
balls: the sparrows come, obviously all the blue tits, coal
tits, great tits, long-tail tits. We've had a lot of long tail tits this year and they are mainly in the garden because
of the food that I put out for them. There's a mix here this is called a 'seed
mix' of different kinds of seeds in here of course we have the meal worms, you can actually have live or dried meal
worms - I have the dried meal worms. I just gently soak them for
15 minutes in lukewarm water and lots of birds like this,
you'll remember earlier on in the year I did some photography out in the garden
and one of the first birds to come was the Jay. That jay came because of these meal worms, later on it started eating fat balls
and got a taste for the fat balls but the meal worms can bring in all sorts of
different birds and our lovely British robin loves meal worms. We have more suet here this is in half a coconut.
Now we're not feeding the birds coconut - it's purely the container and we do that a lot in
in Britain of putting suet in half a coconut. Obviously the coconut already has
its hanger, I actually take this off and I put a metal hook through here.
And of course we have the sunflower hearts This is the main food I use, some sunflower seeds
still have their husks on - they can be the black ones or indeed the black and white striped ones.
I don't use those because the birds discard the husk and you end up with a little bit
of a mess of husk at the end of the day, whereas with these sunflower hearts, the
birds eat all of the sunflower heart. So you might ask which is the best.
Some of you, particularly people who are feeding for the first time, are
not going to be wanting to put out four different feeds for the birds.
And I wouldn't recommend that. First of all you've got to start getting the birds
used to coming to your garden, knowing there's some food there, and what I would do is:
Number one - get some sunflower hearts, virtually all birds will eat sunflower hearts. Fat balls are a good staple as well.
So if you're just feeding with one food, get the hearts and if you want to mix it up and
see what comes in the garden, also get some fat balls or a suet log or indeed half a coconut.
Hang half a coconut from a tree And I am going to experiment with this 'seed mix' This is not a sponsored video, however I buy all my food from a company called Brinvale
and I've been buying from Brinvale online - I just order online, the food comes the next day and I've been doing that for five
or six years, very convenient. All they do is sell bird food, the quality is fantastic, the
birds will eat all this with no waste. I contacted Brinvale telling them I was
going to do a video on feeding the birds and they very generously actually sent me some
extra food that I could demonstrate to you. When I order online with Brinvale - if you spend
over, I think it's 20 pounds, delivery is free. They always include an extra little something as a bonus over and above what
you've ordered, which is quite nice. So if you register with the company so
they know who you are each time you order, they actually give you points for
every order and points make prizes! They give you points with every
order and those points add up and once you have, I don't
know 100 points or 200 points, you can then choose some extra fat
balls for free or maybe half a coconut. Oh, that beautiful winter sunshine just
coming across the garden - isn't that lovely? What's really great about feeding the
birds is that the extra species and the extra number of birds that
come in the garden is fabulous. Over this summer you've seen the long-tail
tits - they've featured in a lot of the videos. They are all the youngsters from this last spring.
It's the first time I've fed properly right the way through the spring and the summer
and it has rewarded me so much, because the adults brought in those
chicks: the chaffinches, the greenfinches, the jays, the woodpecker
even, and particularly the long-tail tits. All those were youngsters from this Spring.
The adults brought them into my garden and showed them where the food was.
And you know, they've come back right up until today and they will still come. They know that there's always
going to be food in Paul T's World! They come to rely on it, so if
you do start feeding the birds, just make sure that you
continue to feed the birds. Can you hear that robin singing? Isn't that lovely? Now the robins are in the garden all the time.
oh it's just gorgeous that robin's singing - I could just sit here all day, I could just
stand here all day and listen to these robins. And the dunnocks they have
started singing as well. The blackbirds not so much so. The blackbirds
have taken a little bit of a breather but come February or March the blackbirds
will be singing as well. The blackbirds have been feeding on the fat
balls, not so much the sunflower hearts. They love the apples that I have
down at the base of the apple tree. I've saved some of the
windfalls, through the autumn and so there are apples to be put
out slowly as the birds eat them. That robin is getting louder and louder! And the fieldfares will come often
in the winter. A fieldfare comes and that fieldfare wants the apples. I have the bullfinches, they love the
sunflower hearts all the tit family: the blue tits, the coal tits, the long-tail
tits - they all like the fat balls. However all of them except the long-tail
tits like the sunflower hearts as well. Robin will do anything for a meal worm,
particularly when they have chicks. And it's when they have chicks that you can actually get the robins to
come and take the mealworms from your hand. So I really want to encourage
you to feed the birds, but you have to choose an appropriate
place to put the bird food. Now when you start putting bird food
out, if you haven't done it before, you have to be patient - you
have to be really patient! Those birds will not suddenly come to
the garden and start feeding on the food. They have to get used to it, they have to
realize it's there and sometimes you'll have some of the more confident birds - maybe
a robin will come to the sunflower hearts the other birds will notice this, see what
the robin does and they will do the same. and once you have one or two birds coming then
the rest will start coming, but do be patient and do make sure that the food stays fresh. Now you'll notice that I
haven't mentioned peanuts. Peanuts actually is a good food and is excellent and it's the traditional food
that we feed our birds in Britain. However, now sunflower hearts, seed food
mixes, suet and the fat have taken over. Peanuts have really high fat value and are
excellent for birds, the only thing is you need to have a feeder that's got a small mesh so
the birds have to pick small pieces of the peanut. Because otherwise they can choke and
you don't really want to be feeding peanuts in the Spring when
there are young birds about because we don't want adult birds
feeding the youngsters with peanuts. So let's have a look at where we put the
bird food and what we put the bird food in. Let's look at the feeders. There are any number of receptacles,
feeders for the fat balls. This is one that I use. Just about fit three in that
one and there we are and then we just hang that up in an appropriate
place that I'll talk about in a minute. Mealworms. I simply put some in a small
container, this little terrine is fine. You've seen many of the birds eating
from this, you can put them in a tray or indeed put them on the ground. ..and then I just put a little bit
of water in, say something like that. Leave that for 15 minutes, just let the
moisture be soaked up by the dried mealworms and then, that's a lovely - that's a
fabulous food for adults and chicks. You don't want to leave them too much in the
water because you don't want them to go soggy. So after about 15 minutes what I might
do is just take some of the water out. Just hung that fat ball up on the tree
literally this second, I'm filming here, I've just hung them up and the long-tailed
tits have come straight down to them. There, isn't that fabulous? I'm just standing quite quietly about seven or eight feet from
them, they're quite used to me now. One has gone over to the coconut. Oh he's flown off now! The birds are waiting for me to finish
this video, I can see birds flying around. Where are they? There they are, they're waiting for me to finish. Well they're not waiting for me
to finish the video are they? They've decided they want the food right now! They're not interested in YouTube videos, they're
interested in having some fat ball right now. See if I can find any others...
they come in the apple tree. All the birds seem to travel around together, so this blue tit will travel
around with the long-tail tits. Now chaffinches, I know I
can see there's a chaffinch in the apple tree right now
and he's come along as well. I say 'he' - there are two or three
males and three or four females. Let's just have a look to see what
other birds are around at the.... oh, oh there we are - we've
got a dunnock right there. Now the dunnock is one of the very, very few
birds that don't actually come onto the fat balls. They will come on the ground and scavenge whatever the other birds have knocked
off the fat balls, or indeed the sunflower hearts. Now can you see his beak? He's got a thin beak, if you can make that
out - so he's more of an insect eater. If you have birds with thin
beaks it's more for insects. Then you have the finches with
thicker beaks and they like the seeds. Right, so now the birds have...they've gone. Okay, so there was a little flurry and
they'll be back again in another hour or so. So we can carry on with the video. Brinvale have very kindly sent me
two of their most popular feeders and these feeders will be ideal for the
'seed mix' and for the sunflower hearts. So let's have a look at the feeders.
Obviously you hang them up here, just lift that up to put the food in. Very sturdy. I think it's metal, these are
squirrel-proof. What I mean by squirrel proof is the squirrels will not destroy this at all. Squirrels will get to it of course and they'll get
the food inside and they'll swing about on them. But they will not destroy or
damage this feeder at all. Now what I like about this feeder, it has
a thread here so if you have some kind of pole with a thread on top you could actually have
this screw to the top of a pole with that thread. And the other thing that's even more important, I don't know whether you can see here
but you can actually take this apart. There's a little screw there, unscrew that and this will slip right
out so you can clean these. Because you do want to clean the feeders fairly regularly
because there's an extra number of birds here and there can be bacteria and the such
like, so always best to clean them. This is obviously a larger one. I'll tell you what bird absolutely adores these
sunflower hearts and that's the greenfinches and the goldfinches and once they come on
here they will sit here and eat all day. This is a special mix that Brinvale have
formulated I can see all sorts of things in here and we'll see what birds - will do a little
experiment and see what birds prefer this mix and what birds prefer the sunflower hearts. It looks a good mix this. All right, so we'll pop that up - let's
have a look at the larger one here. So with this larger one I will put
some flower hearts in. So as I say, if you're only going to feed the birds one
food - I would recommend sunflower hearts. If you're going to feed the birds two
foods, sunflower hearts and fat balls. And in a minute we'll have
a look at where we should put these feeders, it's quite
important where the feeders go. Let's see where we put these feeders. You want a place where the birds feel confident that they can rush back to safety at a
moment's notice and away from predators. So as you know from all my videos, I
planted this area here, so it's ideal with the trees and the bushes. So what
the birds like to do is they sit there, check that the coast is clear and then dart
out to feed on the coconuts or the seeds. So I hang the coconut there. I've just put the seed hopper
there hanging from the apple tree and we've already got the fat balls here
and indeed I've only just put them up and as you saw, we've already had plenty
of birds feeding from it straight away. Absolutely fabulous! It keeps the garden alive, helps the
birds through the cold winter nights. It's not just food of course that birds
need in the Winter, they need water. Birds keep warm by what's inside them but
also the feathers and that's why birds preen and keep all their feathers in tip-top condition. If they don't, they just won't keep
warm and they need water for that. So they need water just as much in the Winter as
they do in the Summer. So please put water out - clean water for them in the winter, so you'll see
them having a bath in the cold freezing water. They do like it and then preen afterwards,
we wouldn't exactly be doing that but they realize how important it is. So in the
morning, if your birdbath is frozen over, take the ice out and replenish
it with clean fresh water. I've put a link to Brinvale
down in the description below should you wish to try out their
food. It's the food I always buy. I would like to thank Brinvale for sending some
extra food and the two feeders to show you today. So if it's proved useful to you, please
give the video a like - hey why not subscribe and see what I'm going
to do next year in Paul T's World. Bye
