The best bird seed mix out there for you depends on what you want to do.
Want to keep starlings away? Offer only hard-shelled seeds: black-oil sunflower, safflower, striped sunflower, millet. Avoid peanuts, sunflower chips, suet nuggets and cracked corn at all costs.
Want to avoid grackles…have one feeder that only has safflower in it and nothing else.
Want to avoid house sparrows? That’s tough, sunflower isn’t their favorite, but at the end of the day, they’ll eat anything. On the upside, their activity attracts other birds to your feeder.
Want to avoid squirrels? Move to Mars. In all seriousness, half the battle is feeder placement combined with either a squirrel baffle or weight sensitive feeder (that really is its own blog).
This is an example of a good all purpose mix. A handful of cracked corn or millet isn’t bad, but you want your main ingredient to be sunflower seeds.
I feed something a little fancier than the above.
The Falcon Heights squirrels are either too lazy or too chonky from my neighbor’s feeders to get airborne. Most squirrels can jump five feet vertically and ten feet horizontally. My squirrel baffles are about 4 feet off the ground and even on nights when I leave a patio chair near the feeder pole, they never make the jump. This means I can feed all the fancy foods at my feeders with no mammal repercussions. Don’t tell anyone…but I don’t even have starlings so I can even feed seeds out of the shell too.
Golfinches chowing down on my custom mix of seeds.
The birds in my yard have made it clear: they like sunflower seeds. They especially like them out of the shell with side of sunflower seeds out of the shell. If I could throw in some dried mealworms that would be awesome. Oh and for the love of Pete, could I cool it with the safflower, that would be great. And since I try to avoid too many empty seed shells, I try to offer some seeds out of the shell—that makes mixes more expensive but since I’m not going out to restaurants that much or paying for parking, I have some extra cash for birdseed right now.
White-throated sparrow and fox sparrow going for extra fine sunflower chips in a hollow log that I turned into a bird feeder/photography background.
If I have a good number of native sparrows hanging around, I’ll toss some white millet on the ground. I cannot resist that huge variation of tantalizing browns found in native sparrows. I’ll buy extra fine sunflower chips and toss them far and wide. Squirrels can smell it, but the scattered chips are little reward for digging through the grass and they sniff frantically around, whereas dainty sparrow beaks can snatch them up easily.
The seed I like to offer my birds is not cheap, yet I don’t want all of my discretionary income going to bird feed. So I started cruising for for prices online, my intent was to find someone to deliver seed to me, but much like my plain sunflower post, I got caught in the vortex of general bird seed pricing. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been caught dead purchasing Ace Hardware brand seed or Kaytee brand bird seed. I remember at one point some of the seeds in Kaytee mixes had dyed seeds—think of a general bird seed mix with hot pink safflower. However, clearly sometime in the last fifteen years they’ve made better mixes and use nicer seed.
For my home yard, I want a mix of sunflowers in and out of the shell as well as some peanuts out of the shell and dried mealworms. I can’t find anyone who makes this mix. The closest I can find goes by several names: Songbird Mix, Songbird Delight, Fruit and Nut…however all of these have safflower which most of my birds leave behind with the discarded sunflower shells (Please don’t email me about how much your birds love safflower, there’s geographic food tastes and I find in my neck of the woods, safflower on it’s own in a separate feeder works great to deter grackles. Rose-breasted grosbeaks and tufted titmice especially like it but I have neither this time of year where I live in Minnesota).
So here are the wackadoodle prices that I’ve found.
Coming in at .99¢ per pound this bird store had what I could call a reasonable price.
For once, Amazon was the most insane in their pricing coming in at $2.87 per pound. Also…note that you can purchase the seed from other sellers either new or used…ew.
Another bird feeding store and this one was a ZOWIE at $2.33 per pound if I bought 30 pounds. Not only must this seed be this year’s crop but also every kernel was hand polished.
Look at this insanity from Chewy.com! It comes out to $2.23 per pound if you purchase a 20 pound bag.
I found this at Fleet Farm online which was $1.34. When I went into pick it up, it was on sale for $17.99 which came to .89¢ per pound.
Since Fleet Farm had Kaytee on sale, I bought three bags. I also saw they had a bag of Nut and Berry on sale for $15.99 (the one Chewy has for more than double so I added one of those too. I mixed them all in my metal can and have this:
It’s sunflower in and out of the shell, it’s got a variety of nuts, it has fruit…and annoyingly it has fruit flavoring mixed in and smells like cough syrup. It’s not like birds are attracted to the smell but boy howdy does it get the squirrels and raccoons’ attention.
So, like sunflower seed by itself (which is often a cheaper way to feed birds and will still get you a great variety) seed mix prices can vary wildly. Take a look around and if you were like me and thought for the last 10 - 15 years that you’ll never purchase seed from a hardware store, take another look. Also keep in mind that the bigger the bag you purchase, generally the price per pound should go down.
As always, a wild bird specialty store will certainly answer all of your questions and give a lot of good, personal customer service, but if you’re strapped for cash and want to attract birds to your yard for your family, you can find good/affordable bird seed at a hardware store these days.
In case you have not heard, we're buried under an old school blizzard dumping up here. The local weather folk were predicting with barely restrained glee the potential for a massive storm. And though many of us have heard in the Twin Cities that we could get 1 - 2 feet of snow, many of us eyed this impending Snowmaggedon with skepticism. It often amounts to only a few inches. But to to be safe, I head out to Neil's for some last minute honey bottling finished--I need to get some together to mail to family for the holidays. I generally use birds at the feeder as an indication if the weather predictions are true. On Friday all feathers pointed to us getting seriously slammed on Saturday. The goldfinches were draining the thistle feeder and even the pileated woodpecker chowed down on the suet feeder closest to the window.
