Choosing Bird Seeds: Expert Tips

Rich Edie:

Hi. Rich Edie with Wild Birds Unlimited on Memorial Lane & Cypress. One of the questions we get asked the most is, “Which bird seed is the best feed to put out in my backyard?” Well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to walk you through our most popular blends, and try and answer some of those questions.

When you start with our Supreme Blend, it contains black oil sunflower seed, striped sunflower seed, sunflower chips, and safflower. Safflower happens to be one of the cardinals’ and house finches’ favorite food. Supreme will attract birds like you see here: cardinals, chickadees, and house finches.

If you want to attract ground-feeding birds, like your dove or sparrows, then you can go to our Deluxe. Deluxe is formulated just like the Supreme, but they’ve taken out the sunflower chips and incorporated white millet. The birds that are on the feeder will kick the millet to the ground, and your ground-feeding birds will jump down onto the ground and clean up the millet off the ground.

Now, if you don’t want to feed ground-feeding birds, but you still want to attract your cardinals, chickadees, and titmice, but you also want to attract your woodpeckers, blue jays, titmice, Choice is a fantastic blend for you, because not only does it have the black oil sunflower and striped sunflower, but it’s also added peanuts to it, which are the favorites of woodpeckers, titmice, and blue jays.

Now, understand all three of these bags are what we call no waste; the birds will eat everything that’s in these bags. But they are not a no-mess. The shells from the seeds will fall to the ground. So, one of the things folks don’t like about feeding black oil sunflower is you will get sunflowers sprouting under your feeders. So, if you want to eliminate the mess and you don’t want things to germinate under your feeders, then you can move to our No-Mess blend. This is 20 pounds of edible food. It’s sunflower chips, diced peanuts, and this one also has calcium in it, which is great for bone development and egg production for birds during nesting season. No-Mess will attract your cardinals, chickadees titmice, woodpeckers, blue jays, just about every bird in our area love a No-Mess-

Rich Edie:
… and it’s a clean way to feed in your backyard.