Environmentalists have created a New Year's menu for feathered friends
Ecologists have compiled a New Year's menu for feathered friends, as reported to a BELTA correspondent by the Vitebsk Regional Committee for Natural Resources and Environmental Protection.
Winter is a serious challenge for birds. During the short daylight hours, they must find enough food and get full, otherwise, they have almost no chance of surviving until morning. It has been established that with a good food supply, birds can withstand even the harshest frosts. Ecologists of the region are appealing to the residents of the region with a request to support wintering birds. To do this, it is enough to make a simple feeder, regularly fill it with food, and clean it of snow.
However, the diet of birds, just like that of humans, should be nutritious and harmless. Birds should under no circumstances be given any salty food. Even a few salted seeds or a piece of salted fat can lead to the death of a bird, as its body is unable to excrete salt. Birds should not be given fried, spicy, or sour food, banana peels, or citrus rinds. Boiled cereals freeze quickly and are impossible to peck, and rye bread sours in the crop and is poorly digested, especially in frost.
The most suitable food for many songbirds is sunflower seeds. This is a high-calorie, fat-containing food that granivorous birds readily crush with their beaks, and insectivorous birds, which have switched to eating seeds in winter, peck at. Sparrows, bullfinches, and greenfinches will gladly eat oily rapeseed and flax seeds. If several feeders are set up and this food is provided constantly, flocks of goldfinches, redpolls, and even cautious goldfinches can be attracted. Fresh or dried fruits, berries, as well as frozen cherries, currants, rowan berries, viburnum, and lingonberries will not be ignored by thrushes, robins, tits, waxwings, and bullfinches. Fat-rich peanuts will be a favorite for all feathered friends, and even timid jays will come to visit for this delicacy. In addition, millet, oats, and unsalted fat can be included in the winter menu for birds.
Songbirds gladly visit feeders, but unlike waterfowl, they do not become completely dependent on artificial feeding. Every year, tens of thousands of ducks and swans remain for the winter in Belarus, lured by people during the migration period and by unfrozen sections of rivers and reservoirs, which are abundant in populated areas. Ecologists once again remind that feeding waterfowl is justified only in the absence of open water in the winter period and in extreme conditions: with a sharp drop in temperature to minus 15 degrees and below.