| The nutritional requirements for each of the avian species are very diversified. Age, sex, size, activity and reproduction functions also contribute to a variance in nutritional requirements. While a healthy, adult bird can thrive on a balanced maintenance diet, growth, healing, breeding, nesting and molting all require additional nutrients. Small birds need more food for energy than larger birds do, and reproducing females require more nutrients than males do. All natural and captive diets listed in this document are based primarily on the Spring-Summer diet of these birds. During these seasons, almost all avian diets contain a substantially higher percentage of insects (nearly 100% protein) than the remainder of the year. Nearly all baby songbirds are fed a primarily insect diet. | |||
 | Yellow-billed cuckoo | Animal food: Eats numerous hairy caterpillars; also beetles, grasshoppers, tree crickets, army ants, wasps, flies, and dragonflies, small frogs and lizards.
Plant food: raspberries, mulberries, grapes and other fruits. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Greater roadrunner | Animal food: Eats many insects, especially crickets, large grasshoppers, also cutworms and other caterpillars, beetles, bugs, ants, gophers, mice, cotton rats, birds' eggs and young, lizards, small snakes (including rattlesnakes), scorpions, tarantulas and other spiders, centipedes and millipedes and snails.
Plant food: Almost no plant foods, various fruits, including prickly pears and seeds. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
 | Anna's hummingbird
Black-chinned hummingbird Colliope hummingbird | Animal food: Small flies, ants, bees and beetles.
Plant food: Nectar from flowers. | Nectar Diet, very small mealworms and natural food items as available. |
 | Steller's jay | 25-30% Animal food: Forages much in treetops and in ground. Eats beetles, wasps, bees, grasshoppers, caterpillars and moths, spiders, sow bugs, frogs, eggs and young of small birds; sometimes attacks and kills snakes.
Plant food: Eats many acorns, pine seeds, some wild and cultivated fruit. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Scrub jay | 40% Animal food: Much of time spent hopping about in ground or in bushes. Eats wasps, bees, termites, butterflies, moths, caterpillars of codling moth, cankerworms, cutworms, grasshoppers, crickets, also spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites, mollusks, turtles, snails, eggs and young of small birds, mice, shrews, lizards, frogs.
Plant food: Eats acorns, nuts, pinyons, corn, oats, wild and cultivated fruit. Will come to bird-feeding stations for baby chick scratch feed, suet, bread, sunflower seeds. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Clark's nutcracker | 25% Animal food: Hops or walks about on ground foraging for insects and fallen nuts. In spring, before seeds ripen, hunts on ground for beetles, ants, grasshoppers, crickets, also launches out in air from tree to catch in bill butterflies and other flying insects; digs grubs from bark by hammering on trunk like woodpecker, eats snails, carrion, sometimes takes eggs and young of small birds.
Plant food: Especially fond of pinyon nuts, and seeds of whitebark and Jeffrey pines; eats acorns, juniper berries, stores conifer seeds for winter and spring use. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Black-billed magpie | 75% Animal food: Much of time spent on ground searching for food; flocks catch grasshoppers in fields, especially in late summer and fall; eats insects throughout year, including flies and their larvae and pupae from carrion, carrion; takes some young of small birds in spring; also eats mice, snakes.
Plant food: Eats some grain and fruit. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Yellow-billed magpie | 75% Animal food: Searches on ground for grasshoppers, ants, bees, wasps, beetles, often flips over will bill wooden chips or cow dung in search; also snatches them out of air in short flights from trees; garbage, refuse from butchered livestock, carrion. When nesting, sometimes take young of small birds from nests to feed own nestlings.
Plant food: Eats acorns, grain, fruit of poison oak, coffeeberry and grapes. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| American crow | 50% Animal food: Eats insects, spiders, millipedes, crustaceans, snails, frogs, salamanders, snakes, eggs and young of birds, earthworms; carries clams, scallops, mussels, sea urchins high in air, then drops them on rocks to crack open and eat contents; scavenges on dead fishes, seals, garbage and traffic-killed animals. Coughs up in pellet indigestible seeds, bones, etc.
Plant food: Eats corn, wheat, walnut, oats, barley, wild and cultivated fruit. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Common raven | 75% Animal food: Insects such as beetles, grasshoppers, and cicadas, some small mammals, birds and their eggs, scorpions, amphibians, and lizards.
Plant food: Corn, melons, mesquite and mistletoe. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Mountain chickadee
Chestnut-backed chickadee | 97-100% Animal food: Caterpillars, spiders, aphids, beetles, ants and other Hymenoptera
Plant food: Conifer Seeds | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Red-breasted nuthatch | Animal food: Beetles, particularly weevils, ants and other Hymenoptera, spiders, moths, and caterpillars.
Plant food: Pine, Cypress | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| White-breasted nuthatch | Animal food: Beetles, particularly weevils, ants and other Hymenoptera, spiders, moths, and caterpillars.
Plant food: Oak, Pine, Wheat | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Pygmy nuthatch | Animal food: Spittlebugs, ants and other Hymenoptera, beetles, caterpillars, spiders, and true bugs.
Plant food: Pine | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Brown creeper | 90% Animal food: spiders, small beetles, true bugs, caterpillars, ants and small Hymenoptera
Plant food: Pine, Corn | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| American Dipper | Animal food: Mainly aquatic insects -especially beetles and caddisfly larvae, moths, snails, some small fish, and fish eggs.
Plant food: Virtually none | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms and natural food items as available. |
| Townsend's solitaire | 50% Animal food: Beetles, moths and their caterpillars, spiders, and ants.
Plant food: Cedar, Hawthorn, Madrone, Pine, Gooseberry, Hackberry, Bearberry, Honeysuckle, Poison-oak, Sumac. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, earthworms and natural food items as available. |
| Swainson's thrush
Hermit thrush | Animal food: Beetles, ants, caterpillars, flies and bugs.
Plant food: 7-15% Spring/Summer; 47-60% Fall/Winter; California peppertree, poison-oak, grape, mistletoe, snowberry, buckthorn, nightshade, dogwood, raspberry, blueberry, laurel sumac. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, earthworms and natural food items as available. |
| American robin | Animal food: Beetles, grasshoppers and crickets, ants and other Hymenoptera, caterpillars and moths, spiders, bugs, and flies.
Plant food: 21% Spring; 60-80% Summer-Winter. California peppertree, cultured grape, prune, cultured and wild cherry, raspberry, apple, mistletoe, serviceberry, wheat, fig, buckthorn | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, earthworms and natural food items as available. |
| Varied thrush | Animal food: Principal invertebrates eaten are beetles, ants and other Hymenoptera, caterpillars, millipedes and centipedes, crickets, snails, and miscellaneous insects.
Plant food: Up to 90% wild fruit; Oak, Madrone, Snowberry, Raspberry, Apple, Prune, Honeysuckle, California Peppertree, poison oak, buckthorn, grape, wheat, filaree, nightshade. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, earthworms and natural food items as available. |
| Wrentit | Animal food: Invertebrates, principally ants and other Hymenoptera, beetles, bugs, caterpillars, and spiders.
Plant food: Fleshy fruits constitute about a half or more of the wren-tit's fare except during spring. Poison-oak, Blackberry, laurel sumac, elderberry, christmasberry, grape, waxmyrtle, snowberry, pricklypear, turkeymullein. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, and natural food items as available. |
| Northern mockingbird | Animal food: 60-80% Spring/Summer; 20-30% Fall/Winter; Beetles, ants, bees, wasps and grasshoppers.
Plant food: Grape, peppertree, fig, buckthorn, cedar, poison oak, eiderberry, nightshade, laurel, sumac, blackberry, bearberry. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, and natural food items as available. |
| California thrasher | Animal food: 90% Spring; 45-65% Summer-Winter; beetles, ants and other Hymenoptera, caterpillars and moths, and myriapods.
Plant food: Poison-oak, Sumac, Laurel, Elderberry, Oak, Raspberry, Buckthorn, Grape, Bearberry | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, and natural food items as available. |
 > | Cedar waxwing | Animal Food: 20-25% in Spring and Summer: beetles, ants and other Hymenoptera, flies, bugs, caterpillars, grasshoppers, crickets, and Mayflies.
Plant food: 97% in Fall and Winter, Cherry, Apple, Hawthorn, Russian olive, Blackberry , Roughleaf Dogwood, Grape | 90% chopped apples, raisins, currants, grapes, bananas, cherries or natural foods as available, plus 10% soaked high protein dogfood and mealworms and other insects. |
| Phainopepla | 10% Animal Food: Ants. Spiders, beetles, and miscellaneous insects are also eaten.
Plant Food: Eats mistletoe berries and the scarlet berries of buckthorn along watercourses, also those of juniper, elder, and in settled places, pepper tree; also eats flower petals of guava. | 90% chopped apples, raisins, currants, grapes, bananas, cherries or natural foods as available, plus 10% soaked high protein dogfood and mealworms and other insects. |
| Loggerhead shrike | Animal Food: Spring-fall diet is grasshoppers and crickets; also caterpillars, cutworms, beetles, ants, wasps, bumblebees, flies, spiders; especially fond of meadow mice (voles), also eats lemmings, white-footed mice, red-backed mice, gophers, many small birds. Also snakes, lizards, frogs in winter.
Plant food: None | Adult Maintenance Diet, plus mealworms, day-old chicks, mice, beef heart meat, and natural food items as available. |
| European starling | Animal Food: Spring=95%; Summer/Fall = 60%; Winter = 30% insects such as beetles, grasshoppers, millipedes and caterpillars.
Plant Food: Remaining percentages of diet consist of wild and cultured cherries, sumac, bayberry, mulberry, elderberry, apple, grape, corn, dogwood, viburnum, hackberry and oak. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, earthworms and natural food items as available; variety of chopped fruits.. |
| Western tanager | Animal food: Eats many wasps and ants, nut weevils, woodborers, caterpillars, cicadas, scale insects, click beetles, grasshoppers, termites, bull pine sawflies.
Plant food: Elderberries, cherries, hawthorn apples, and other fruit. | Adult Maintenance Diet plust mealworms, variety of chopped fruit and natural food items as available. |
| Red-winged blackbird
Tricolored blackbird Yellow-headed blackbird Brewer's Blackbird | Animal food: 50% Spring/Summer; 5-10% Fall/Winter: Weevils, beetles, caterpillars, grubs, cankerworms, grasshoppers and ants.
Plant food: Primarily seeds of weeds and farm crops: Wild and cultured oats, wheat, rice, barley, corn, knotweed, redmaids. | Seed-eater Diet
Supplements: |
| Western meadowlark | Animal food: 80-90% Spring/ Summer; 50-60% Fall/Winter: beetles, crickets and grasshoppers, caterpillars, ants, bees and wasps, bugs and miscellaneous other items.
Plant food: Wild oats, bristlegrass, corn, sunflower, wheat, corn, filaree, tarweed, fiddleneck, California poppy. | Adult Maintenance Diet plus mealworms, commercial finch seed mix and natural food items as available. |
RESOURCES:
American Wildlife And Plants: A Guide To Wildlife Food Habits, Martin, Zim And Nelson, Dover Books.
The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide To The Natural History Of North American Birds, Ehrlich, Dobkin, Wheye, Simon & Schuster.
Brukner Nature Center: Primer Of Wildlife Care And Rehabilitation, Patti L. Raley
The Audobon Society Encyclopedia Of North American Birds, John K. Terres, Wings Books
This page was created, and is maintained by Kelly Jensen kellyj@snowcrest.net
Last update: March 14, 1997