What do birds eat?

It depends on the bird and the time of the year. Some eat seeds, berries, fruit, insects, other birds, eggs, and small mammals, fish, buds, larvae, aquatic invertebrates, acorns and other nuts, aquatic vegetation, grain, dead animals, garbage, and much more...

During the spring and summer months, most songbirds eat mainly insects

and spiders. Insects are easy to find and catch and are very nutritious. During fall and winter, however, birds that don't migrate must eat fruits and seeds to survive.

Did you know?
The Cedar Waxwings may become drunk (and may even die from alcohol intoxication) after eating fermented fruit in the spring.

It's great fun to feed birds. Even in cities you may be able to attract birds to

Chickadee by Lon and Barbara Pursell

your home or apartment by feeding them. In urban areas we recommend tube feeders filled with black-oil sunflower seed (these seeds attract the greatest number of species, are nutritious, and high in fat, and their small size and thin shells make them easy for small birds to handle and crack). Another favorite is nyger seed (this seed is expensive -- so feed it in a special nyger feeder so it is not wasted). This seed attracts finches.

If rodents  are a problem in your neighborhood make sure that you clean-up any spilled seeds from the feeders. Place your feeders within three feet of a window (or more than 30 feet away) to reduce the number of birds that die from hitting your windows.

If you are not allowed to have feeders in your apartment building, try a natural bird feeder. Plant seed bearing plants like dwarf sunflowers, cosmos, and asters in pots (or any container that holds some soil and has holes in the bottom for drainage) and provide bright red or orange tubular flowers for hummingbirds. Learn more about feeding birds the "natural way".

How do birds eat?

It depends on the bird. They have adapted to eat lots of different things, in different places and at different heights (this helps to avoid competition for same food sources).

The size, shape and structure of a bird’s bill can tell you a lot about what that bird eats:

• Fish-eating birds (like loons and herons) are generally long, straight, and pointed with sharp edges for grasping or spearing their prey.

• The beaks of birds that catch insects in the air might be short and broad and open very widely so they can swoop through the air and catch insects or they might have strong flat beaks with hooked tips to snatch them in mid-air.

• The beaks of those birds that eat seeds are different depending on the seed that they prefer (photos). Grackles for example, have a sharp ridge on the roof of their mouth – this allows them to crack open large seeds.

Birds don’t have teeth. They have to grind up their food in their digestive tract. Some birds “lap-up” food with their tongues (hummingbirds).

Did you know?
To eat road kill, crows have to wait for something else to tear open the body or

Illustration by Pedro Fernandes

for the body to decompose and soften, since a crow’s beak isn’t usually strong enough to tear open the dead animal’s skin.

Book recommendation: A great book about beaks is: Beaks! by Sneed B. Collard (Author) and Robin Brickman (Illustrator)

How do birds catch food?

Catching food depends on the bird. Some birds dive for fish, others hop around on lawns, eat insects that are attracted to lights in parking lots, run around on beaches with their beaks open, while others hunt.

A few examples:

• Peregrine Falcons “stoop” or dive from high altitudes, very,very fast, and come out of the dive just before crashing on the ground, with their caught prey.

• Black-billed Magpies frequently remove ticks from deer and moose. They might eat the ticks or hide them for later.
• Jays flick aside leaf litter with sideways swipes of bill to find food or sometimes they feed on wasp larvae by stealing the wasp nest and carrying it to a nearby perch. There, they will hold the nest with their feet and dig out the larvae with its beak.
  
• California Gulls might hover over cherry trees and knock fruits to ground. Then, they fly to ground to retrieve and eat the fruits. 
   
• Some birds steal or pirate food from other birds or from humans

   

   

• Ring-billed Gulls will drop hard-to-open food while in flight to the hard ground to break it open for easier eating.
  
• Some birds (crows and ravens) might drop hard nuts on the road and wait for cars to come by to crack them open.
• Corvids (crows, ravens, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers) are clever at finding ways to get food. Watch this wonderful clip to learn more about ravens: