Peanut Butter for Birds: A Field Guide to Doing It Properly

Field notes from the back garden, December.

The short version: yes, you can feed wild birds peanut butter, and in winter it’s one of the best calorie-dense foods you can offer a chickadee or a downy woodpecker. The catch is the jar matters more than people think - the one in your kitchen cupboard, with its salt and sugar and rapeseed oil, is the wrong one. We use natural, unsalted peanut butter only, served on bark or in a drilled log, and we never put it out in summer.

What the science actually says

Peanut butter is what bird biologists call a “high-fat supplement” - a concentrated source of the fat and protein songbirds burn through trying to stay warm. A wild chickadee can lose ten percent of its body weight in a single sub-zero night just by shivering. A teaspoon of peanut butter, smeared into bark, refills that overnight metabolic debt by mid-morning.

The British Trust for Ornithology has been recommending peanut butter as a cold-weather food for over twenty years, with one caveat: it must be the unsalted, unsweetened kind. Salt is genuinely dangerous to a passerine bird - they can’t process it the way mammals can, and as little as a hundred milligrams can be lethal to a goldfinch.

The peanut butter in most kitchen cupboards contains 150-200mg of salt per tablespoon. That is the entire problem in a sentence.

Which birds actually take it

Not every bird is interested. Peanut butter is taken eagerly by insectivores and granivores - the small, restless birds that already know how to glean fat-rich food off a branch.

The reliable customers, in roughly the order they’ll show up:

• Tits and chickadees - black-capped, blue, great, coal. They arrive first and they arrive in pairs.
• Nuthatches - white-breasted in North America, the Eurasian nuthatch across the UK. They cache it in bark crevices for later, which is delightful to watch.
• Woodpeckers - downy, hairy, great spotted. They prefer a drilled-log feeder over a smear; they want to work for it.
• Wrens - Carolina wrens especially, in winter.
• Treecreepers and brown creepers - only if you smear it directly onto bark.
• Jays and magpies - they’ll take it, but they take it all and bully smaller birds off the feeder.

Birds that don’t take it, despite what the internet tells you: ducks, geese, swans, any waterfowl. Their gut isn’t built for it and the fat can cause real problems. If a goose is on your lawn looking interested, give it cracked corn instead.

The feeder that actually works

For five years we tried smearing peanut butter directly onto tree trunks. It works, but it also feeds every grey squirrel within half a mile, and squirrels will empty a smear in under a minute.

The thing that finally fixed the squirrel problem in our garden is below. It’s the Esschert Design squirrel-proof peanut butter feeder - a hinged, weight-sensitive jar holder. Anything heavier than a magpie tips the lid shut. Has worked for three winters running.

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How to serve it

We’ve tested most of the serving methods and the ranking is genuinely this:

1. Drilled hardwood log. A 12-inch length of birch, three or four 1-inch holes drilled to half depth, hung from a chain. You pack the holes with peanut butter and it lasts woodpeckers a week. They cling vertically and chip away. Beautiful to watch.
2. The squirrel-proof feeder above. Best general-purpose answer for a back garden with mixed visitors.
3. A pine cone, rolled in seed. The textbook craft project. Lasts about forty-five minutes if the squirrels are confident, but charming for children to make.
4. Smeared directly on tree bark. Works, but indiscriminate. Squirrels, rats, raccoons - anything ground-based finds it within an evening.

What we do not recommend, despite internet advice to the contrary: spreading peanut butter on bread, crackers, or biscuits. The bread soaks salt and sugar from the manufacturing process and the texture isn’t right for a bird’s beak. Stick to bare peanut butter on bark or in a holder.

The mix we use

Pure peanut butter is too sticky in cold weather - there are reports (though no good controlled studies) of small birds getting it stuck to their beak feathers. So we cut it. Our standard December mix is below.

Birds & Wetlands Winter Mix:

• 1 cup natural, unsalted peanut butter (the only ingredient should be “peanuts”)
• 1 cup rolled oats (porridge oats, the unflavoured kind)
• 1/4 cup mixed wild birdseed
• 2 tablespoons rendered suet OR coconut oil, melted

Warm the peanut butter and fat together until they just loosen. Stir in the oats and seed. Press into the holes of a log feeder, or into a pine cone, and let it set. The oats give it grit so it doesn’t stick, the suet bulks it out, and the seed gives smaller birds a reason to come back.

Refrigerate the leftover mix in a sealed jar. It keeps about a fortnight before it starts to go rancid; bin it the moment it smells off.

When NOT to feed it

Summer. Peanut butter melts and turns rancid quickly above 18°C, and rancid fat is hard on a bird’s liver. Switch to a sugar-water feeder or seed in summer; peanut butter is a winter food.

Without water nearby. Peanut butter is dry. Birds taking it need to drink shortly after. A shallow dish of fresh water within ten metres of the feeder is genuinely part of the system.

On a feeder you haven’t cleaned in a month. Peanut butter goes off and the holder collects dust. Once a month: hot water, dish soap, rinse, full dry before reloading. We do it on the same day we put the bins out so we don’t forget.

Common mistakes

• Buying the wrong jar. Read the ingredients. The only word should be “peanuts.” If there’s sugar, salt, palm oil, or molasses listed, don’t use it. Supermarket own-brand “smooth” is almost always wrong; supermarket “100% peanuts” is almost always right.
• Putting it out in heat. It melts, drips, and goes rancid by afternoon.
• Feeding ducks or geese. They can’t process the fat. Use cracked corn instead.
• Crackers or bread. Choking hazard plus salt. Just don’t.
• Letting it become the only food. Birds need a varied diet - seeds, fruit, live mealworms in spring. Peanut butter is a winter supplement, not a meal plan.

What to keep on hand

If you want a low-effort winter kit, this is the shortlist. We’ve used all three.

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The bottom line

Peanut butter, used properly, is the best single supplement you can put out for small songbirds in winter. The whole game is two rules: read the ingredients (peanuts, nothing else), and treat it as a December-to-February food. Get those right and you will, within a fortnight, have chickadees and nuthatches that recognise the sound of your back door opening.

For everything else we feed in winter, see our guide to the best winter bird seed and our notes on what to actually put in a bird feeder.