Feed live food to birds in the breeding season.

Blackbird with a mealworm © Phil Pickin

For readers outside the UK, it may come as something of a surprise that the country’s leading wildlife charity (the RSPB), which focuses on the welfare of birds, is advising people not to feed birds! To be accurate, they advise against feeding wild birds during the summer months due to the risk of infections being transmitted at feeding stations.

As you can imagine, this has divided opinion within the garden bird-feeding community, especially during the period from April through to July, when gardens often become busy nurseries for a wide range of garden birds. It’s the time of year when you’ll often see blue tits rushing to and from nest boxes, robins foraging, and blackbirds keeping their eyes open for insects in the lawn or in flowerbeds.

While this is entertaining for us, the parent birds are under huge pressure to feed hungry chicks throughout the daylight hours. While suet (one of the foods that the RSPB suggests is ok to feed during the summer) is enjoyed by many birds, there is one food source that can help increase the survival rate of these young birds — mealworms.

Mealworms provide not only protein to help growing birds but also vital hydration and amino acids, making them the ideal food for many species. In addition to these benefits, they are easy for young birds to digest, making them ideal for feeding them.

Despite these advantages, some people are unhappy about handling live mealworms, so they often opt for dried ones, which are also easier to store. Although not as nutritionally advantageous as live food, they may be ideal for many, so if you do decide to offer them to the birds in your garden, the RSPB and BTO advise that you soak them first. This makes them more palatable and less likely to dehydrate the chicks.

It is also thought that the mere fact that the mealworms wriggle makes them attractive to birds. The natural wiggling action attracts the bird’s attention as they instinctively look for that type of movement when foraging for food. Another justification for live food over dried.

In the past, most garden birds would have been able to easily find sufficient food for their young from natural sources. However, with changes in gardening techniques and styles, the rise in pesticide use and the growth in the use of paving and artificial grass, coupled with climate change, make finding live food much harder. By offering live food, you are going some way to redress the balance.

With recent changes to the guidelines on feeding seeds and peanuts throughout spring and summer (aimed at encouraging certain vulnerable species to congregate unsafely around traditional feeders), mealworms can provide a real alternative. With live food and suet being approved for year-round feeding, you can keep feeding your garden birds through the spring and summer months. However, even with live food given the green light, there is still a need to keep the feeders clean.

If you do opt to feed live food, always wash your mealworm dishes at least once a week with a mild disinfectant. It’s also a good idea to move the feeder to prevent a buildup of bacteria on the ground below. Mealworms do need to be kept cool and ideally fed mealworm food, which in turn will benefit birds that feed on live mealworms. Mealworm food is made from nutrient-dense bran, so there is always a risk of spillage onto the ground; moving the feeder occasionally is also advisable.

Quite apart from the conservation benefits of feeding live food to the birds and the help you are providing to the next generation of birds, the birds may quickly learn to wait for you to refill the feeder. Your local robins, tits, and blackbirds may learn when you refill, so you may well end up being followed by a local blackbird or robin when you are in the garden. What could be better?