Peanut puzzle - part of the answer
Feb 4th, 2008 by Birdy Trish
I’ve been looking into feeding peanuts to birds and it seems a very complicated issue - to me anyway.
Not feeding peanuts to birds is nothing to do with peanuts being bad for birds, which is what I first thought when I heard about this issue.
Not feeding peanuts to birds is about the possible scarcity of peanuts because of the oil seed inside peanuts.
It seems the growers of peanuts can get a far better price for their peanuts by selling to companies who are using peanut oil to make bio fuel
So not feeding peanuts to birds is about the possible scarcity of peanuts.
One of the places it is possible to get peanuts (of a bird feeding quality) from is China. The question is - with all this talk of carbon foot prints should we buy peanuts from such a long way away? I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe it’s yes.
I found out -
The good news is that Sunflower hearts are a good replacement bird food for peanuts.
Then a few days later I found out that -
The bad news is that sunflower hearts can also be used for bio fuels as can black sunflowers. So it’s possible they may be come scarce.
Questions
Is there really a scarcity of peanuts for birds?
Do some of the peanuts come from China?
What other bird seed will feed the variety of birds that eat peanuts?
I live six miles away from a shop so I buy my bird food in bulk from Soar Mill Seeds and they deliver it quickly and speedily.
I noticed they have a 13 kilo bag of black sunflower seeds which have been grown in the UK. Which is great. I have bought a bag.
I have also bought some peanuts.
We have to be careful about our carbon footprints but we also have to be certain we get our facts together before we make decisions.
Can anyone help with any more information about the politics of feeding birds in my back garden. Can we solve the puzzle together?
Tags: carbon-footprint, peanuts, sunflower
