Wild Birds Unlimited Staying Seasonally Savvy with New Line of Winter Bird Food

We all know bird feeding is fun, but being a seasonally savvy bird enthusiast means you are tuned into the bird’s seasonal nutritional needs. That’s why Wild Birds Unlimited launched a brand-new, exclusive line - Winter SuperBlend. Winter SuperBlend provides birds the essential fat for winter survival. Fat is a concentrated energy source.

This will be the brand’s first truly seasonal line of bird food, offering a loose seed blend and the always popular and convenient seed cylinder. The products are now available in Wild Birds Unlimited shops across North America.

Andrea McNeely, Product Development Manager for Wild Birds Unlimited, and John Schaust, the company’s Chief Naturalist, spoke about the new product line and the benefits it will provide our feathered friends.

“These product innovations are so important for the birds,” McNeely said. “Our goal at Wild Birds Unlimited is to always put out the best products on the market, not just for the birds but also for our customers.”

“Customers can offer Winter SuperBlend right now,” Schaust said. “This bird food is made with a high-fat content, which birds need because they may need to replace 10 percent of their body weight, in the form of fat, every single day. This is because they may burn up that amount of fat every night. That’s why these high-fat foods are so crucial and sought by the birds.”

Providing a high-fat diet for birds is crucial in the wintertime, even when the birds don’t live in a cold climate. Regardless of the weather, winter means shorter days and longer nights, which means less opportunity for foraging.

“In the winter, these birds are spending, depending on what part of the country they’re in, 13, 14 hours overnight living off of their fat reserves,” Schaust said. “During the summertime, it’s exactly the opposite. There are shorter nights and longer days. In the winter, they have to get through the entire night using fat reserves, even if it’s not really cold. They have a shorter amount of time during the day to replenish that fat, which they need to get through that long night again.”

The new products can also help birds in another way: seed caching. Seed caching is when birds are storing something they actually need: food for survival throughout the long winter months. The hippocampus (the spatial memory part of the brain) is proportionally larger in chickadees and other caching birds, like titmice, nuthatches and jays, than in birds that do not cache food. This allows them to remember where they hide food for successful retrieval later.

“Birds will literally take a seed and hide it, and they will do hundreds of these a day,” Schaust said. “They’re hiding thousands of seeds over the course of fall and early winter as a reserve food supply. The birds’ behavior transfers from the natural foods they would normally hide to hiding seeds from our feeders. So you can sit there and watch them all day long going back and forth, grabbing one seed after another and flying off to hide them

McNeely and Schaust are thrilled about the new product line and excited to see the customer response to it.

“Here at Wild Birds Unlimited, we always ask ourselves ‘What’s that next new cool thing that will help us see birds?’” McNeely said. “These foods do that for our customers. Not only are they really good for the birds, they also help customers enjoy the hobby.”

And of course, the birds will always come first at Wild Birds Unlimited, a brand that prides itself on offering a unique experience to customers while also giving birds a nutritional helping hand throughout the year.

With more than 300 locations throughout the U.S. and Canada, Wild Birds Unlimited is the original and largest franchise system of backyard bird feeding and nature specialty stores. Recently ranked No. 2 overall and No. 1 in the Retail category on Franchise Business Review’s prestigious 2018 Franchisee Satisfaction Awards, there's no better time to join the Wild Birds Unlimited team. Click here to learn more.