What to Feed Birds in Winter

In order of usefulness: suet, black oil sunflower seed, peanuts, then everything else. Fat carries roughly twice the energy per gram of carbohydrate, and in winter the whole problem is banking enough calories in a few hours of daylight to survive a fifteen-hour night. Two purchases — a no-melt suet cake and a bag of black oil sunflower — cover most of a northern yard.

The list, in order

1. Suet — the highest-value thing you can put out

Rendered fat, usually blended with grain into a cake. It is the densest energy available and it reaches the insect-eating birds that ignore a seed feeder entirely: woodpeckers, nuthatches, creepers, wrens. Project FeederWatch is explicit that suet is how you reach those species.

Buy plain no-melt high-energy dough in a standard cake size. The full ranking, and what no-melt actually means.

2. Black oil sunflower — the one seed to run

Thin shell, high oil content, opened easily by small bills. It is eaten by nearly everything at a northern feeder and it is the correct default. Buy it straight, not in a mix, and buy 25 lb in autumn if you have somewhere sealed to keep it.

3. Peanuts — the reliable draw

High fat, and the single most dependable way to bring in woodpeckers, titmice, jays and nuthatches. Available shelled in a mesh peanut feeder, or blended into a suet cake, which is the tidier route. Unsalted and unroasted only.

4. Nyjer, safflower and the specialists

Nyjer brings goldfinches and siskins and almost nothing else, in a dedicated fine-port feeder. Safflower is bitter to squirrels and grackles and acceptable to cardinals, which makes it a niche pest workaround rather than a staple. Both are worth adding once the basics are running; neither is a first purchase.

5. Cracked corn — the ground-feeder option, with a caveat

Cheap, and juncos, doves and sparrows will eat it off a tray or the ground. The caveat is that it also brings deer, rodents and, in numbers, birds you may not want. Scatter small amounts.

Kitchen items that are genuinely fine

• Unsalted, unroasted nuts — peanuts, walnuts, almonds, chopped.
• Plain rolled oats, uncooked and dry.
• Apple and pear, chopped, for thrushes and waxwings. Windfalls are ideal.
• Raisins and currants, soaked. Keep them away from dogs, for whom they are toxic.
• Hard cheese, grated, in small quantities. Wrens and robins take it.
• Plain cooked potato or rice, unsalted, in small amounts.

The list of things that are actively harmful is short, specific and worth reading properly: what not to feed birds in winter.

How much, and how often

The thing most people forget

Water. A bird eating dry suet still has to melt snow with its own body heat to drink, which is precisely the metabolic cost you were trying to avoid by feeding it. The Cornell Lab notes birds get most of their winter water from snow and dripping ice, and have real mechanisms for conserving it — but liquid water is far cheaper for them than snow.

A heated bath or a drop-in de-icer costs roughly what your suet does over the same winter, and it is the thing most yards are missing. The running cost is published in full.

What to buy

Hardware to put it in: winter feeders. The specific fat-vs-carbohydrate argument: suet vs seed in cold weather. And once food and water are handled, somewhere to spend the night is the third leg.