Juanita Browne: How feeding the birds can help your mental health and ease eco-anxiety

Who knew watching a blue tit outside your window could be so good for your soul, writes Juanita Browne

Adding bird feeders to your garden, patio, balcony or window offers an extra food supply and often a vital lifeline for garden birds, like the blue tit above. Picture: Michael Mac Sweeney/Provision

Winter is a difficult time for garden birds. Insects, an important food staple for birds, die off over winter or are in hibernation, so there’s very little food available. Adding some bird feeders to your garden, patio, balcony or window offers an extra food supply and often a vital lifeline for garden birds. 

Not only will you be helping local bird populations, but these garden visitors will also do something positive for you too: they’ll help your mental health. Pretty to look at, amusing in their antics — as they take turns for access to the feeders — they provide a closer connection with nature, and that’s been proven to be good for our physical and mental health. Adding bird feeders to your school or office garden, too, will bring benefits for students and staff.

Daily contact with nature has been linked to reduced levels of stress, improved concentration and reduction in obesity. Observing wildlife has been proven to lower blood pressure and help to increase feelings of wellbeing. 

Indeed, if you know someone who is feeling lonely, gifting them a bird feeder and some food is a lovely way to help and will give them many days of interest and hopefully bring a little more joy to their lives. Placing a bird feeder close to a window is key so that you can observe the birds from indoors without disturbing them.

Feeding birds on school grounds can also offer teaching opportunities for classes to run short surveys, recording what species visit each day and in what numbers, and they could even record which foods different species prefer.

It’s really amusing to watch birds splashing about to clean their feathers. Picture: iStock

A bird bath is also a great idea. We have drained a lot of our ponds and wetlands in this country and in dry or frosty weather, it can be difficult for birds to access water for bathing. It’s easy to make your own bird bath using a shallow plant tray, and if you can raise it on rocks, old upturned flower pots or wooden legs, this will allow birds to feel safe to land and bathe. 

It’s also really amusing to watch birds splashing about to clean their feathers. In my own garden, I see them ‘queuing up’ to take a turn in their outdoor washroom.

Here are some tips for feeding your garden visitors. 

• Keep to regular meal times: Fill up your feeders at the same time each day because the birds will become dependent on this food source, and can spend valuable winter foraging hours hanging around empty feeders waiting for them to be replenished. 
• Keep feeders clean, and food fresh. 
• Place your feeding station away from bushes or walls, where cats may hide to catch visiting birds. 

In addition to buying seed mixes, peanuts, sunflower or niger seeds, or coconuts, you can also offer kitchen scraps such as baked potatoes, oats, raisins, sultanas, or apples. Avoid bread or desiccated coconut as both can cause stomach problems.

Feeding your local birds is also a proactive way to relieve ‘eco-anxiety’ — that anxiety we can feel when faced with climate change and biodiversity loss. Who knew watching a blue tit outside your window could be so good for your soul.

• Juanita Browne has written a number of wildlife books, including My First Book of Irish Animals and The Great Big Book of Irish Wildlife. Contact the author at [e-mail]