I’m sure you’ve all seen birds eating bits of fruit and vegetable from the bird table, whether it’s your bird table or someone else’s. However, you may be thinking, can birds eat oranges?
In a quick answer, yes, birds can eat oranges but there’s a little bit more to it than just putting a few peeled oranges onto your bird table or on your garden and expecting them to just ‘tuck-in’ to them.
Read more below and understand how to prep oranges for birds and the benefits they get from eating them.
How to Prep Oranges to Feed Them to Wild Birds?
Feeding orange to birds isn’t particularly difficult as you can just put them onto a bird table or throw onto your lawn for starlings but actually getting them to eat them is another task in itself.
As you know, oranges can often be a little tough on the outer sometimes and it’s not until you’ve actually bitten into them that you can finally enough the citrus juice and tasty flesh inside.
This is the problem when you feed them to birds, you have to pierce them first to help birds get into the flesh.
Yes, birds beaks are strong and sharp but similar to birds eating grapes, it can be the initial resistance of the skin that actually makes them quite troublesome to eat.
So What Should I Do?
Whether it’s a whole orange or just some leftovers from mealtime it’s better to pierce the tough, white pithy skin (not the peel) and tear them into small pieces, similar to the size of your fingertip.
As mentioned before, you can start by placing small amounts on the bird table for table feeding birds and then throw some onto your lawn for the ground feeding birds.
You may notice that one of your first visitors will be a pigeon or a pair of pigeons because, to be honest, they are not fussy what they eat at the best of times…
How Do Birds Benefit From Eating Oranges?
Birds will gain the same types of health benefits from oranges as humans would too.
Oranges are packed full of vitamin C which can help birds at tough and stressful times, such as times of moulting or during the spring months whilst they’re busy raising and providing for their young.
Vitamin C will help with the immune system of birds, no matter what time of year it is but more so during the cold months of autumn and winter.
Vitamin C can also help birds with or reduce the following:
- Help regulate weight control
- Ease stress during moulting
- Increase immunity
- Improve fertility
- Improve digestion unless the’s an overindulgence in Vit C
Whilst oranges are beneficial to birds it is best to place just a small handful out for the bids and spread out in various places in your yard because there’s the potential of diarrhoea in birds that may happen with overindulge.
The spreading out of the food will also help to prevent the same birds from eating all of it or alternatively try placing different types of fruit or vegetables in your garden at the same time.
You may wish to try;
- Sweetcorn
- Lettuce
- Peas
- Sliced tomatoes
- broccoli tops
- cucumber
and even coconut (not desiccated though…)