This is such an interesting part of creating a wildlife-friendly garden. Bird feeders don’t just bring birds into your garden for a quick snack—they can help create a whole little ecosystem, so what insects do birds eat?
If you offer a variety of foods, you’ll attract a range of bird species. And while some specialist insect-eating birds won’t visit feeders at all, many garden birds will happily fill up on suet pellets before heading off to search your trees and shrubs for another high-protein meal.
Beetles, caterpillars, aphids, flies, spiders and other insects are all part of the menu.
So, by inviting birds into your garden, you’re also inviting in some very effective natural pest control.
Caterpillars are particularly important during the breeding season. They are packed with protein and fats, helping young birds grow quickly and healthily.
Blue Tits and Great Tits can feed their chicks an astonishing number of caterpillars during the nesting season. They need 100 caterpillars for each chic each day! Their broods can be anything from 7 to our biggest clutch that was 17! Thats a lot of caterpillars.
Wrens will happily snack on aphids and tiny flies, many of which are tucked away among leaves and vegetation where we might never notice them.
Beetles, including weevils, are also enjoyed by birds such as Starlings and Nuthatches.
Spiders are eaten by a wide variety of birds, but Swifts have a particularly fascinating way of finding them.
Swifts spend much of their lives flying through the air with their mouths open, catching tiny airborne insects and spiders. This includes tiny spiders that use strands of silk to “balloon” through the air on the breeze.
When feeding their young, Swifts can collect enormous quantities of insects and spiders, sometimes gathering them together into little food balls before taking them back to the nest.
Of course, if we encourage more birds into our gardens, we may also reduce the number of insects—and that means we need to think about the insects too.
A wildlife-friendly garden needs to provide food, shelter and water for insects as well as birds.
That could mean leaving a few untidy areas, planting plenty of flowering plants, keeping shrubs and vegetation, creating log or wood piles, adding insect hotels and providing shallow water sources with pebbles or stones for insects to safely drink from.
It’s all about creating different little habitats where wildlife can thrive.
Our insect populations are under serious pressure, with intensive agriculture and the widespread use of pesticides and insecticides playing an important role in their decline. These chemicals can affect far more than the insects they are intended to target, with knock-on effects throughout the food chain from birds to mammals.
Insects are essential to our ecosystems. They pollinate plants, break down organic matter and provide food for countless birds, mammals, amphibians and other wildlife.
So when you make your garden a safe place for insects, you’re not just helping the bugs.
You’re helping the birds that eat them, the plants that depend on them and the wider wildlife that shares your garden.
Even a small patch of land can make a difference. By providing food, water, shelter and a few places where nature can be a little less tidy, you can turn your garden into a valuable refuge—a small haven where wildlife has somewhere safe to feed, breed and survive.
