Yes, sunflower hearts are good for birds! Sunflower hearts (that is, sunflower seeds with their husks removed) provide essential nutrition and calories, which is particularly important during winter but can be helpful all year round. A wide variety of birds enjoy eating sunflower hearts, so if you put some out in your garden, you should find that they disappear very quickly!

Read on for more reasons to feed sunflower hearts to your garden birds.

Sunflower hearts are high in calories.

Wild birds require high-calorie foods like sunflower hearts (which are rich in oil and protein) to survive cold spells and keep themselves warm. In the UK, this is relevant throughout the year because of our famously unpredictable weather — you never know when the temperature is going to plummet!

Sunflower hearts are easy to eat.

Whole sunflower seeds are also high in calories, but sunflower hearts have the added benefit of being easier for birds to eat. Some birds struggle to remove the shells from sunflower seeds, so why not do the job for them and put out sunflower hearts that have already had their shells removed?

Put simply: by offering shell-free sunflower seeds, you’re enabling a wider variety of birds to access the health benefits of sunflower hearts!

Sunflower hearts make less mess.

On a related note, sunflower hearts aren’t just good for birds – they’re also good for your garden! The shells (or husks) from sunflower seeds will often end up littering the area beneath your feeding table or bird feeder. This can be messy to look at and could also potentially attract pests.

Rather than wasting time cleaning up all of those shells, go with sunflower hearts. These are great for staying tidy (which is why they’re a key ingredient in our best-selling Tidy Garden Mix™).

Sunflower hearts are perfect for combining with other seeds.

Just like humans, birds require a varied diet. Sunflower hearts are good for birds, but an even better option is to offer a seed mix that combines sunflower hearts with other nutritious ingredients. This way, birds can enjoy the healthy fat and energy provided by sunflower hearts, while still getting vital nutrients and minerals from other seeds.

By including sunflower hearts in your seed mixes, you are helping birds to enjoy a high-energy, healthy diet!

Ready to start serving sunflower hearts?

As we’ve established, sunflower hearts are very good for birds when they are enjoyed as part of a varied diet. High-calorie bird feeds like sunflower hearts help to keep our feathered friends in robust health, especially during the winter and other cold periods.

If you want to add some sunflower hearts to your bird feeding station, we’ve got some great options for you here at Really Wild Bird Food. We offer premium sunflower hearts, as well as sunflower heart chips for smaller birds and fledglings. Use the buttons below to shop healthy sunflower hearts for your garden birds.

Premium Sunflower Hearts   Sunflower Heart Chips

Sunflower seeds are a highly nutritious snack loved by all manner of wild birds! Sunflower seeds are packed with a wide variety of valuable nutrients including iron, magnesium, and vitamins A, B, C, and D.

Sunflower seeds are also a great source of healthy oils and fats which are great for helping wild birds maintain a healthy weight, especially during the difficult winter months.

As well as being very nutritious, sunflower seeds are also super yummy! Wild birds can’t get enough of their delicious taste! If you put sunflower seeds out in your garden, these are just a few of the wild birds you might expect to pay you a visit:

As the cold winds blow and temperatures plummet, there’s no denying that winter is well on its way! In the winter months, birds can struggle to find enough food to get by.

Berries are an important food source during winter months, when many other food sources are scarce and the ground is too hard to hunt for burrowing insects.

A much-loved garden-dweller across the globe, the songful sparrow is a welcome addition to any garden, providing a cheery sight and a wholesome ambience.

However, a decline in numbers has led to concern over the humble sparrow’s ability to survive in the UK. 

In fact, certain areas of the UK (such as Yorkshire and London) have seen the population of House Sparrows in particular drop by a staggering 70% between 1995 and 2017, according to the Breeding Bird Survey 2018.

A delicious and very high energy seed mix, containing crunchy dried mealworms for extra protein and delicious berry flavoured suet pellets for extra warming calories.

Well - who doesn't put on a few pounds over Christmas?!

This crumble is a real winter-warmer for your resident robin and will be loved by other soft-billed garden visitors such as thrushes, dunnocks and blackbirds. This mix also contains home grown naked oats, home grown millet, sunflower hearts, pinhead oatmeal and peanut granules.

You can order some right here!

Putting bird food out in the garden for the birds is the best way to attract a wide variety of birds to your garden. It is always great to have a garden full of wild birds. And to make sure that these visit your garden often you should keep on filling up those feeders frequently.

Birds can also have their own food preferences however. For instance goldfinches love Niger seeds and sunflower hearts while blackbirds love soaked raisins. The tree sparrows on the other hand love millet and plain canary seeds. Peanuts are a favourite amongst the Blue Tits, Great Tits, Coal Tits and Long Tailed Tits, Nuthatches and the Great Spotted Woodpecker.
So when all these different birds have such different preferences, why not try and stock your feeders with a maximum variety of seeds so as to attract a wide variety of different birds?

At Really Wild Bird Food, we have come up with this new Mini Pick and Mix concept wherein you can select 2kgs of any of our Seed Mixes, Straight Seeds or Peanuts! With this offer you can combine some good varieties in a cost effective manner. Choice of seeds is completely up to you and you can choose from 2 to 6 selections of 2kg bags.
At The Really Wild Bird Food Company we have a wide variety of bird feed options to choose from and with this new Mini Pick and Mix concept you can mix and match any combination and save money too!