Best Berries for Garden Birds

Thu 12th January 2012

This week I’ve been watching a team of 4 or 5 blackbirds stripping a heavily laden pyracanther hedge of its crop of bright orange berries. After a few days all that’s left is bare stalks and rotten ones! To be fair the wood pidgeons cleared the more accessible branches back in September, but now the blackbirds finished the job, perching amongst the prickles to consume all within reach, or plucking single berries in flying leaps from the ground. The latter technique made me wonder if the energy yield per berry was worth the cost of securing it!

Berries are a favourite food for many garden birds, the main crop ripening in autumn, and lasting through much of the winter. They are good for the likes of blackbirds, thrushes, robins, blackcaps and starlings that take live food in warmer weather. Pyracantha, aka Firethorn, features in any top 10 list of plants for birds due to it’s spectacular autumn berry display. It is usually grown against walls or fences where its spikey evergreen branches provide all year shelter for birds, with the bonus of summer flower clusters to attract insect food.

Other good berry bearers include the cotoneasters, and our native holly, hawthorn, ivy, elder, rowan and honeysuckles. Berries of different plants target different species for seed dispersal, with variations in size, colour and accessibility. They may ripen at different times and have varying shelf-lives, holly berries being particularly long lasting and remaining edible well into spring. Ivys are amongst the latest to yield a fully ripe crop – the common varieties are quick growing late flowering climbers providing winter nectar followed by purple-black fruit at a time when other berries are long gone.

Having said that, wood pidgeons are inclined to eat significant proportions of unripe ivy berries early in the season – maybe they were doing the same to my pyracanther back in September!