Help Birds by Offering High Fat Foods

High fat foods are highly sought out by backyard birds, especially during this time of year. Fat provides them with many important nutritional benefits:

• Highly concentrated energy
• Dietary pigments to bring color into the feathers - from red to orange to yellows to violet
• Storage of body fat to fuel the bird between meals, through migration, and during cold days and nights
  
  • Songbirds may use up to ¾ of their fat reserves during one winter night! If sources of high-fat foods are available, they can entirely replenish those fat reserves during the next day. In some birds this can amount to a 10% fluctuation in their daily body weight.
• Providing high fat foods helps birds throughout the winter, especially when the weather is extreme, and finding natural food sources can be difficult. If a bird exhausts all of its fat reserves, protein, scavenged mostly from muscles, is used to sustain its energy needs. It is important for birds to eat plenty of fat calories each day in order to maintain their strength and fitness.
• Our backyard suet feeders provide a direct source of high energy fat and many seeds (sunflower, safflower and nyjer) provide high levels of fat due to their substantial oil content.
       Recommended Blends: No Mess and No Mess Plus
       Recommended Seeds: Peanuts, Nyjer, Sunflower Chips
       Recommended Other Foods: SuperSuet, Bark Butter Products