Fancy feeding orange bread to your Robins?

A couple of weekends ago, while on a walk along the coast near my home, it was sad to see all the bushes bare of leaves, reduced to colourless twiggy skeletons.

All, that is, except for this one:

What a beauty! Its leaves were still almost all in place and were set off by a dense crop of bubblegum-pink fruits.

This is a small native tree that hides its light under a bushel for the rest of the year, and only now shines brightly - it is the Spindle.

So I was delighted to see that a Blackbird was pecking away at the fruits (it had scuttled deep within the bush by the time I had got my camera out). Then up pops a Robin doing exactly the same.

In fact, the Spindle's berries are a particular favourite of Robins, so much so that in parts of Germany the tree is known as the Rotkehlchenbrot, or Robin's Bread.

What birds tend to do is wait until the pink fruits are ripe enough that they split, revealing a bright orange seed inside (or at least the fleshy seed-casing, called the aril, is orange).

The birds then eat the aril, and either pass the seed later in their droppings or regurgitate it. Song Thrushes and Blackcaps will also eat Spindle berries.

Were the Spindle not such an anonymous tree during spring and summer, perhaps more would be grown in gardens and more birds would benefit as a result.

So the good news is that there is a cultivated version with added attraction to human eyes. It is called 'Red Cascade' and its leaves turn fiery red in autumn. Growing only to about 5m tall, it is fine for even quite small gardens, although beware that the fruits are somewhat poisonous. Look for it under its scientific name of Euonymous europaeus 'Red Cascade', and you too could soon be feeding bread to your Robins the natural way.