Best Bird Seed for Finches — 5 Picks, 2 They Actually Eat

Finch feeding is unusually simple and unusually easy to get wrong. The seed list is two items long. Most of the failures have nothing to do with which bag you bought.

The two seeds, and why there are only two

A goldfinch bill is a pair of tweezers about eight millimetres long. In the wild it works thistle, aster and goldenrod heads — small, soft-shelled, oil-rich seed. Nyjer is close enough to that to be taken immediately, which is why it works and why nothing else in a general mix does.

Hulled sunflower is the other one, for a different reason: the shell is the obstacle, and somebody has removed it. That puts a high-fat seed inside a finch’s handling ability and also makes it the only genuinely mess-free seed sold.

Everything else in a supermarket bag — millet, milo, cracked corn, wheat — is either too large or of no interest. A finch standing in a general mix is picking out the sunflower and dropping the rest.

The stale-seed problem, which is most of the problem

This is the single most common finch-feeding complaint, and it almost always has the same cause.

Nyjer is roughly 35% oil. Oil oxidises. A bag opened in April and still in use in August has turned, and finches detect it long before a person would. From the window the result is indistinguishable from “the birds have gone”: a feeder that stays full for weeks.

Hygiene is not optional at a finch feeder

Finches are flock feeders, and they crowd. House finch conjunctivitis — swollen, crusted eyes, birds that sit on the perch and do not fly — spreads at feeders where birds are in constant contact with the same surfaces. It is one of the few genuine ways that feeding birds can make things worse rather than better.

The routine is short:

• Every two weeks in warm weather, monthly in cold
• Hot soapy water, a brush through the tube, then a weak bleach rinse
• Dry completely before refilling — damp is what spoils the next batch
• If you see a bird with crusted eyes, take the feeder down for a week

A mesh feeder is easier to keep clean than a plastic tube with narrow ports, which is most of the argument for buying one.

Feeders, briefly

Nyjer will not stay inside a normal feeder — the ports are sized for sunflower and the seed simply runs out. The three options are a fine-mesh tube, a small-port tube sold as a finch feeder, or a mesh sock.

A sock is three or four dollars and perfectly effective for a season. It will also soak through in the first heavy rain and fray by the end of the year. If finches show up at a sock, buy a mesh tube; if nothing comes in a month, you have learned that cheaply.

Hulled sunflower works in anything you own already, including the hopper the cardinals use.

Seasonal expectations

A finch feeder is not equally busy all year, and the summer lull catches people out.

Late winter and early spring are usually the peak: wild seed is gone, natural food is at its lowest, and goldfinch flocks are hungry and visible. Midsummer is quiet, because nesting songbirds switch to insects for their young and have less need of seed. Autumn picks up again as flocks reform.

Goldfinches also moult twice a year, so the brilliant yellow bird of May is the drab olive bird of November. The same birds, in winter dress — not a different, less interesting species that has taken over the feeder.