Providing High-Fat Foods

Typically, your feeders serve as a supplemental source of food for birds in your yard. In contrast, during periods of cold and severe winter weather, your birds may switch to utilizing them as the critical source of food that enables them to survive from day to day.

A 3-year study in Wisconsin concluded that when temperatures fall below 10 degrees, Black-capped Chickadees without access to feeders have only a 37% survival rate as opposed to the much higher 69% survival rate for those able to utilize feeders.

If chickadees are representative of other feeder birds, then your feeders can make a big difference in the number of birds that survive the winter.  Also, birds may burn up to 10% of their body weight in stored fat each night to stay warm…and this fat must be replaced every day.

Be sure to keep your feeders filled with the high-energy, high-fat foods that provide your birds with the crucial nutrition they need to survive. Below is a list of the high-energy foods we carry at WBU Little Rock.

High on the list of best choices to meet this nutritional need is Jim’s Birdacious Bark Butter. This spreadable, suet-based treat is loaded with fat and protein and is known to attract more than 100 species of birds.

Related to bark butter are Jim's Birdacious Bark Butter Bits, with calcium. These high-energy foods are soft, pelletized foods that are easily consumed by virtually all birds. They can be offered in dishes or mixed in with many of our seed blends.  These are now available in Hot Pepper too, to help deter squirrels!

WBU Suet Stackables are suet cakes that can be mixed with seed cakes and used on any of our three Seed Cylinder feeders to offer a variety of foods in one location.  Again, these are now available in Hot Pepper!

WBU Suet and No-Melt Dough cakes can be used in a variety of feeders, including our tail-prop suet feeders (see picture below recently taken by one of our customers) favored by clinging birds such as woodpeckers.  This product is also avaialble in Hot Pepper!