How to make your garden more attractive to birds

If you offer birds favourable conditions — a place to sleep, nest and feel protected — you will soon enjoy many different sights and sounds in your garden.

It's hard to imagine a garden without the morning and evening serenade of birds. These enchanting singers keep garden pests in check, and some spend the whole year in your garden. In the summertime they are joined by migratory birds, who will nest and raise their families.

• Plant as many shrubs and hedges as possible; they offer our useful fine-feathered friends a place to nest, as well as providing materials for nest building, secure places to sleep and, above all, shelter from wind and weather.
• Plant climbing plants, too. Climbers are an ideal habitat for birds, especially when grown along masonry, walls or fences.
• Know that flycatchers, redstarts and wrens love small hollows in old trees.
• Plant berry bushes. Blooming shrubs and trees that bear berries in the fall supply birds with sufficient nourishment before winter. They especially enjoy the fruits from blackberry, rosehips and blackthorn, or from hedge plants such as barberry, elderberry, dogwood and hawthorn.
• Plant beautiful blooming honeysuckle. It offers birds an excellent place to nest. Its berries, however, are poisonous for humans. The same goes for the spindle tree.

• Build a birdhouse or nesting box by using rough pine or spruce boards about 2.5 centimetres (one inch) thick. Remember to leave a fairly wide exit so birds can get out easily.
• Hang a nesting box in a sheltered and not-too-sunny place, at least three metres (10 feet) high to give the nesting birds security, and locate the entrance hole so that it faces southeast.
• Put a generous layer of wood chips or shavings in the bird box.
• Place a bird bath on a stone pedestal that cats can't climb. Keep it filled with fresh water.
• In the winter, turn over the top layer of the compost heap; birds will find plenty of insects on its underside.

Mix 275 grams (nine ounces) unsalted suet (or unhydrogenated coconut oil) and 500 grams (18 ounces) seeds, raisins and oat flakes. Cut the fat into little pieces and melt it in a pan. Stir in seeds, raisins and oats until a doughy mass forms. Let cool, shape into little dumplings and hang them up.