Country & Coast: Birds may need our help but they won’t share my cheese

After all everybody knows birds perish in cold weather, while the RSPB advises they should be provided with mega-calorie foods which maintain their body fat reserves in order to help them survive those frosty nights.

That usually means putting out plenty of high-fat items like sunflower hearts, baskets of peanuts, and - the ultimate waistline-buster for birds - fatballs packed full of high-calorie seeds and nuts.

Many people also put out kitchen scraps like bacon rind, lumps of suet, and even plate-scrapings of fat from the Sunday roast.

And in Tony Soper’s The Bird Table Book, published back in the 1960s, the following advice was offered: “If you have one of those splendid whole Stilton cheeses at Christmas, don’t throw away the near-empty shell. Birds are very partial to Stilton, and prefer it when it is not swamped with port!”

Well, perhaps they eat nothing else in Harrogate - especially with port - but everywhere else putting out Stilton seems pretty extravagant.

The point Soper was making, though, was that birds need to eat as much fat as possible. And I always thought that to be pretty obvious until I came across the results of studies by the British Trust for Ornithology which suggested some birds that eat lots of high-fat foods may actually be producing fewer chicks when they breed come the springtime.

The Trust’s ornithologists provided blue tits and great tits with so-called peanut cake - a rich 50-50 mixture of beef suet and ground-up peanuts - and then discovered that these birds went on to have fewer chicks than those which were not fed peanut cake.

However, another British Trust for Ornithology study suet was put out for great spotted woodpeckers and it was found that these birds actually reared a higher number of chicks than those not given suet.

Go figure, as the Americans say.

My own view of this work by the bird boffins is simple. Birds firstly need to survive before they can think of breeding, and the best food that will help them is the stuff most of us gave up eating some decades ago in all but small quantities: beef suet and dripping, supplemented with oily nuts and seeds.

The fatballs on sale at garden centres and supermarkets across the country are mostly designed for hanging up and thus enticing aerobatic performers like tits and finches, so I always bash some of them up into a bit of a crumble and spread it on the patio or a low bird table for ground-feeders like blackbirds, robins and dunnocks which would otherwise miss out.

My garden birds will also be getting bits of leftover chicken and turkey from December’s festivities, but I certainly won’t be putting out Stilton, with or without port.