Winter is a great time to get into bird feeding or double down on the hobby. Natural food sources become scarce and a convenient, consistent food source in your yard will be a welcome resource for local birds that stay in your neighborhood in the winter.

However, bird feeding is a messy hobby. Birds don’t treat a bird feeder like a Michelin Star dining experience. They’re going to toss food around and get shells everywhere. This can be unsightly and attract rodents for easy pickings on the ground.

To be frank with you, bird feeding will never be a 100% mess-free hobby, but I’ve been feeding birds from my apartment balcony for five years and found a couple of foods you can put out to cut your mess and clean up time significantly. If you want to backtrack, or start this hobby with as little mess as possible, you can’t go wrong with the two foods I’ll detail below.

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1. Sunflower Chips

Sunflower seed draws in a ton of different bird species and is usually pretty cheap…as far as bird seed goes. It’s a good source of protein and fat for birds during the winter.

Black oil sunflower seed is fantastic and I love it…but it will leave shell remnants below your bird feeder. It costs a little bit more, but I almost always buy sunflower chips without the shells now. Having a full-time career has it’s perks, I suppose.

Sunflower chips have the added benefit of being pretty much free of any filler ingredients. I’ve reviewed several brands on this website and don’t find fillers in sunflower chips. The extra money is well-worth the spend.

Amazon has a ton of different sunflower chip brands. Any bird feeding hobby store, hardware store or major home retailer (Home Depot, Lowes, Menards) will also have it for sale.

A ton of birds will eat sunflower seed too. Here are some species that like it:

• American Goldfinch
• Blue Jays
• Chickadees
• Dark-Eyed Juncos
• House Finches
• Grosbeaks
• Mourning Doves
• Northern Cardinals
• Nuthatches
• Pine Siskins
• Titmice
• Woodpeckers
• Wrens

2. Suet

Suet is a great addition to your feeding station if you’d like to draw in more Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, and Chickadees. It’s fantastic bird food in the winter because it’s mostly fat, birds need a lot of it to keep going during the winter.

Suet comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I usually just buy a block of it and stick it into a suet cage feeder (these only cost a few bucks). But you can also buy logs that specifically go into suet log bird feeders.

If you’re having issues with squirrels eating your suet, you can also experiment with spicy suet. I’ve had solid results with it slowing down squirrels.

There you have it. I hope you find these two bird foods helpful. There are actually several additional foods I’d recommend exploring for winter bird feeding (highlighted in a recent story linked here), but if you’re dealing with a big mess at your bird feeders and want to cut that down, these two options should help.

Happy bird feeding and stay warm out there this winter!