Bird food preference chart: 34 species against 13 foods

The short answer

• Black oil sunflower is rated 3 or 4 by more species in this matrix than any other single food, which is why it is the default recommendation everywhere.
• Safflower is the sharpest filter in the chart: cardinals, chickadees and house finches take it, grackles and starlings score 0 or 1.
• Millet and cracked corn are ground-feeder foods almost exclusively, and putting them in a hanging feeder wastes most of the bag.
• Four species in the chart cannot be reached with any seed: robins, bluebirds, orioles and hummingbirds need fruit, insects or nectar.

Most bird feeding advice is written one species at a time, which makes it impossible to answer the question people actually have: given the birds in my yard, what should be in the feeder? A row-by-row account cannot be read as a column.

So we built the grid. Thirty-four common North American feeder species, thirteen foods, one five-point scale.

Top top-tier favorite Yes eats readily Some takes occasionally Rare rarely No not a feeder food

How to read it#

Across a row is a shopping list for one species, in priority order. A row with several 4s is an easy bird to feed. A row that is mostly 0s and 1s, like American Robin, is telling you that a seed feeder is the wrong tool entirely.

Down a column is what a bag buys you. This is the reading that changes decisions. Look down the cracked corn column and you will find mostly doves, jays, sparrows and blackbirds, which is either exactly what you want or exactly what you are trying to avoid.

The scale:

One seed does most of the work#

Counting down each column turns the grid into a single ranking: how many of the thirty-four species eat that food readily or better.

Two things in that chart are worth sitting with. The first is how flat the top is: sunflower hearts and black oil sunflower are close, and everything after them drops away sharply. The second is that the specialist foods at the bottom are not failures. Nectar reaches three species in this dataset and no seed reaches them at all, which makes it the highest-value food on the chart for anyone who wants hummingbirds.

What the chart is not#

It is not a measurement of consumption. A grackle flock eats more sunflower in an afternoon than a pair of cardinals eats in a week, and the chart does not encode that: both score 3 to 4. If your problem is volume rather than variety, the chart tells you what to remove, not how much is being taken.

It is not regionally weighted. Anna's Hummingbird and Steller's Jay sit in the same table as Carolina Wren and Baltimore Oriole, and no yard on the continent hosts all of them. Use the range column in the species index to filter first.

It is not a substitute for watching your own feeder. Local populations learn local habits, and the most interesting deviations from this table are the ones happening in your yard. If you find one, tell us: several of the ratings here have been revised on exactly that basis.

Using the chart to solve the usual problems#

"I want cardinals, and I keep getting grackles." Read the two rows side by side. Cardinal scores 4 on safflower, grackle scores 0. Switch the main feeder to safflower and give it three weeks.

"Nothing touches my nyjer." Read the nyjer column. Only goldfinches, siskins and, to a lesser degree, house and purple finches rate it 3 or above. If those birds are not in your area or not yet at your feeders, the seed is not the problem. And nyjer goes stale faster than any other common seed, which is the second most likely explanation. See nyjer.

"I want the maximum number of species for one feeder." Sunflower hearts on a covered platform. It scores 3 or 4 for more species than any other food-and-feeder pairing in the dataset, at the cost of being the most work to keep clean. See platform feeders.

"I want to stop feeding starlings." Read across the starling row for the 4s: suet and mealworms. Then read the suet column and note that the birds you want from suet, woodpeckers and nuthatches, are all clingers. That is the whole argument for an upside-down suet feeder.

The full dataset#

Everything above, plus feeder attributes and food nutrition figures, is published as a single JSON file:

https://birdfeederweb.com/datasets/bird-food-matrix.json

It is licensed CC BY 4.0. The structure is documented in the methodology, which also explains the judgement calls and the places where the underlying evidence is thinner than we would like. The same file powers the bird food matcher and the seed cost calculator, so what you see in those tools is what is in the data.

Frequently asked questions#

What seed attracts the most bird species?

Black oil sunflower, by a clear margin. In this matrix it scores 3 or 4 for more species than any other food, it works in almost every feeder design, and its thin hull suits small bills as well as large ones. Sunflower hearts score similarly and add ground-feeding species that struggle with hulls, at roughly twice the price per pound.

Which birds will not eat sunflower seed?

American Robins, Eastern Bluebirds, Baltimore Orioles, Northern Flickers and hummingbirds all score 0 to 2 on sunflower in this matrix. They are insect, fruit or nectar feeders, and no seed strategy will bring them in. Mealworms, fruit and nectar are the foods that reach them, offered in a dish, on a spike or in a nectar feeder.

Does safflower really keep grackles away?

In this matrix Common Grackles and European Starlings both score 0 on safflower while Northern Cardinals score 4 and Black-capped Chickadees score 3, which matches what most feeder operators observe. It is not absolute. Some individual birds and some regional populations learn to eat it, and a hungry bird in hard weather is less fussy. Treat it as a strong filter rather than a barrier.

How were these scores assigned?

They combine published feeding-preference research and agency species accounts with observed feeder behavior, condensed onto a single five-point scale so that species and foods can be compared side by side. The scale, the judgement calls and the known weaknesses are documented on the methodology page. Where sources disagreed we scored conservatively, one point lower rather than higher.

Can I use this data on my own site?

Yes. The matrix is published as JSON at /datasets/bird-food-matrix.json under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Use it, remix it, build on it, and credit Bird Feeder Web with a link. If you find an error, please tell us so the correction reaches everyone using it.

Sources and further reading

1. Common Feeder Birds Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Project FeederWatch Species accounts and food preferences used as a primary reference
2. All About Birds species guide Cornell Lab of Ornithology Diet, range and behavior for each species in the matrix
3. Bird Feeding and Care National Audubon Society Food and feeder pairings