Christmas dinner for the birds...

Do you spend the next week eating the left over food from Christmas?

Why not give your garden friends some dinner too (a great  way to step up and help nature)! But be careful - not everything is suitable for the birds!

 Ray Kennedy (rspb-images.com)

Try Christmas scraps like Christmas cake crumbs, mince pie pastry crumbs and biscuit crumbs. Other suitable foods for birds include mild grated cheese, cooked or uncooked rice, dry porridge oats, cooked potatoes and fruit.

But please don't put out turkey fat. Turkey fat can be dangerous for garden birds, and can even kill them!
After Christmas dinner, many people put the leftover contents of roasting tins outside for birds, wrongly believing it’s as good for them as other fats like lard and suet.

They pour the fat onto bird tables or mix it with seed thinking it will give them extra energy and much needed nutrients.

However, cooked turkey fat is completely unsuitable for birds for several reasons:

• Even when cooled, it stays soft which means it could smear onto birds’ feathers and damage water proofing and insulating qualities.
• Because of its softness, popular ‘bird cake’ cannot be made with cooked turkey fat.  It will not harden to hold its shape when mixed with seeds.
• Meat juices and other left over liquids mix together with the fats in the roasting tins and can go rancid very quickly.  This becomes an ideal breeding ground for salmonella and other food poisoning bacteria.
• Salt is very bad for birds and many people rub turkey joints liberally with it to crisp the skin.  High levels of salt are toxic to birds.

Birds are prone to bacterial infections at this time of year as their defences and energy levels are low because of the cold.

If you want to use the fat from your Christmas meat, just cut off the fatty bits BEFORE cooking.  Uncooked fat from any meat is perfectly good bird food and very suitable for making bird cakes. 

For more information you can read the whole story from the RSPB here.