Best Bird Seed for Cardinals — 5 Picks, Safflower First

Cardinals are not fussy birds, which is why so much cardinal advice is useless. They will eat most of what you put out. The question worth answering is narrower: which seed brings cardinals in without also feeding every squirrel, grackle and starling in the neighbourhood?

That has one answer, and it is safflower.

Why safflower is the lever

Cardinals have a short, deep, conical bill built to crush seeds, so a thick white safflower shell is no obstacle. Squirrels can crack it too — they simply find it bitter and go elsewhere when something better is available. The same goes for grackles, starlings and red-winged blackbirds, the three species most likely to arrive in a flock and strip a feeder in an hour.

The practical effect is not that safflower attracts cardinals harder. It is that a feeder full of safflower still has seed in it when the cardinals arrive.

Expect a transition period. Birds learn feeders by habit, and a feeder that has held sunflower for a year will look wrong to them for a week or two after you switch. Traffic drops, then recovers. The commonest mistake is reading that dip as “cardinals don’t like safflower” and switching back on day four.

Where feeder choice beats seed choice

A cardinal weighs about 45 grams and has no interest in clinging. It cannot use the two-inch perches on a standard tube feeder, and it will not hover like a chickadee or hang like a finch. So the seed in your tube feeder is almost irrelevant to cardinals — they need somewhere to sit.

Placement: edges, not middles

Cardinals are edge-habitat birds. In the wild they feed in the scrubby margin between woodland and open ground, and they stay close enough to cover to reach it in one short flight. A feeder in the middle of a lawn reads to a cardinal as exposed, and it will be used nervously or not at all.

Ten feet from a hedge, shrub or brush pile is roughly the sweet spot — far enough that a cat cannot ambush from inside the cover, close enough that a hawk’s shadow means one wingbeat to safety.

What the cheap mixes are actually made of

Pick up a supermarket wild-bird mix and read the order of ingredients. Red millet, milo (also labelled sorghum), cracked wheat and oat groats are in there because they are cheap agricultural by-products, not because songbirds want them. House sparrows and some doves eat millet. Cardinals mostly do not.

What happens is predictable: the cardinal tips through the mix looking for sunflower, throwing everything else out. You lose the seed, the ground below the feeder turns into a wet mat of spoiling grain, and that mat is what brings rats. A bag that costs half as much per pound and is two-thirds rejected is not cheaper.

Storage, which decides whether the bag was a bargain

Seed goes stale and seed goes mouldy, and both are commoner than people expect. Oil-rich seed like black oil sunflower oxidises over a few months in a warm shed; damp seed grows aspergillus mould, which is genuinely dangerous to birds.

• Decant into a sealed bin — metal if you have rodents, thick plastic otherwise
• Keep it cool, dark and dry; a garage floor beats a sunlit porch
• Buy sizes you will use in about two months in summer, three or four in winter
• Bin anything that smells musty or has visibly clumped, rather than putting it out

That last point is why the 25 lb sack is only a bargain once you know the birds are eating it.

A seed plan that works most places

Run two feeders if you can. A hopper or tray of safflower is the cardinal station, and it stays full. A second feeder of black oil sunflower is the everything-else station, and it carries the chickadees, finches, titmice and woodpeckers — plus the squirrels, which is fine, because they are then busy somewhere other than the cardinal feeder.

That arrangement costs a little more in seed and solves the two problems people usually try to solve with one feeder and a lot of frustration.