When I agreed that Love Garden Birds would sponsor the bird food page of Fatbirder I gave them a warning… I would happily review their products but I would do so honestly showing warts and all… I’d never set out to harm, but I owe it to fatbirder users to be brutally honest when I review whether it be the latest optics, fieldguide or humble garden offerings.
I have a tiny urban garden. Some of you will have lounges that would swallow it up. Nevertheless, I pack it with pots and grown lots of shrubs and berry plants to attract birds and flowers for the bees and butterflies. It is a ‘feeding station’ and we go through industrial quantities of feed to keep ‘our’ birds happy. This has meant that a patch that used to support half a dozen sparrows, a couple of dunnocks and assorted doves now punches way above its weight with forty sparrows, almost as many goldfinches, and hordes of starlings with a longer cast list of tits, robins, thrushes et al. They descend upon us, make a thorough mess and yet we love them. We even string up apples for the local Ring-necked Parakeets that sit on our washing line pull up the strings and munch the apples until nothing is left but a pile of peelings on the patio.
So when a batch of feed arrive from Love Garden Birds it dIdn’t take long for the ‘lads’ to arrive and strip the feeders bare.
This month we’ve been testing out the suet products offer by Love Garden Birds and its gone down a treat… in fact its gone down so fast we’ve hardly kept up with the demand!
Lets start with the suet pellets which Love Garden Birds describes as:
Premium Suet Pellet Bundles
Suet Pellets are small pieces of suet and seed which are easy for birds to feast upon or take to a safe location to eat. Coming in a range of flavours and colours this high energy suet will attract a wide variety of bird species to your garden. Suet Pellets can be fed from a specific suet pellet feeder, peanut feeders, bird tables or ground feeders.
We put them in an appropriate feeder where the sparrows and tits in particular have really got stuck in… when they are not shoo’d away but bully boy starlings. In an attempt to spread the bounty some pellets are scattered about our Cherry tree with its under story of elder and nettles, so the blackbirds get a look in. Lately, the biggest bully of them all, a magpie has been vacuuming them up before our blackbird can. He meanwhile spends twelve hours a day serenading us, while the magpie adds this insult to the injury he caused when he robbed the eggs from the blackbird’s nest in our pyrocantha bush.
We also fill the ‘robin feeder’ with the pellets. Despite having the dome lowered to a setting that is too small for blue tits to attempt doesn’t deter the starlings they’ve taken to forcing their way in to get the pellets. We popped out to lunch today at 11.30am having just filled the robin feeder to the brim. Returning at 12.45 pm we find that it is empty except for the starling inside tring to scrape the last morsel of suet from the plastic dome!
So a multitude of starling ‘thumbs up’ for Love Garden Birds!
Our other experiment has been with Love Garden Birds suet balls. I don’t know about you but suet balls seem to us to come in an extraordinary range of qualities. We’ve bought them in buckets from the ‘stack it high, sell it cheap’ supermarkets. And from the most prestigious quality suppliers. They range from brilliant food to nothing better than slightly fatty sawdust!
When I opened the box that arrived from Love Garden Birds I couldn’t help saying the Hawkeye “what a load of balls’ as we decanted them into any containers we could find in the garden shed. In doing so found my hands were covered in fat as if I’d been hand mixing butter into flour. This isn’t something I had noticed with other fat balls. The fat content in the premium suet balls seems very high. Love Garden Birds say about their product:
Premium Suet Balls
Premium suet balls with insects really are premium, made from the highest grade suet to provide wild birds with more energy and nutrition in every beak full.
The team at Love Garden Birds love these suet balls made in the UK, the adage “you get what you pay for” certainly is true with these balls over standard fat balls. The extra suet content means that a wider range of wild bird species will come back to the balls time and again. The high fat content also means that the balls do not break up as easily so you have less mess on your grass or patio and less pigeons.
We have seen Blue Tits, Great Tits, Long Tailed Tits, Blackbirds, Starlings, Robins amongst others feed from the suet balls on a regular basis.
Available as 50 in a Tub, 150 in a Box and 300 (2 x 150 Boxes).
Please note that the 150 boxes will always contain the same weight of premium suet but due to slight variation in size of the balls the actual number could be slightly higher or lower than 150.
Ingredients: High grade beef suet, wheat flour, peanut flour, millet seed, linseed, rapeseed and insect powder.
Our verdict? They are simply the best we’ve ever had. I thought the quantity we had would last for months… no way! They disappear down avian throats as fast as we can get them into the fat ball feeders.
The ONLY downside I can see is the fat slick on the patio pavers. So much is consumed in such a hurry that the surface beneath the feeding station has to be cleaned with boiling water to re-melt any fat that escapes. On the other hand its not as bad as the gunk from inferior fat balls that sets like concrete.
I can honestly say that these fat balls are the very best quality I’ve come across the birds just love them! It’s a relief to be able to heap praise on an advertiser… I like to work with quality suppliers whether its optics, birding trips or bookshops… seems Love Garden Birds can join the ranks down Quality Street.