Birdkeeper Notices Birds Throwing Sunflower Seeds All Around the Feeder — Turns Out, It’s Not Rare

It may sound unfair, but table manners are not for those who possess wings. When you set up a bird feeder, expect a clamorous cacophony of shrills, chirps, and trills, not silk napkins folded white and neat. Instead, expect hell-evoking loads of mess. Birds are moody critters. They don’t follow dining etiquette. Screaming bluejays will dunk their food in and out of water. Red-bellied sapsuckers will butcher the food. White-breasted nuthatches prefer the take-out option as if ordering a pizza from your bird feeder café. These sloppy eating habits of birds agonized a 35-year-old man called u/Kaidan-Alenko. He asked Reddit whether these behaviors are normal.

The birdkeeper described that he usually watches their birds from behind the curtain or in camera, like a creep, because otherwise, the birds will flit away due to fear or panic. Plus, being a frequent sufferer of intrusive thoughts, he couldn’t bear to sit all alone on a garden chair outdoors. When he noticed some tits arriving in his garden and displaying a strange behavior at the bird feeder, it triggered another tailspin of intrusive thoughts in their head. Why they were doing this, he wondered in puzzlement.

“Why do blue tits and great tits throw so many sunflower seeds out of a feeder that contains only sunflower seeds? Are some of the seeds bad? Are they trying to feed other birds on the ground? I've only seen pigeons and other bird species, not the tits, eating the discarded sunflower seeds,” the Germany-based birder wrote in the post title, and shared a 2-minute video compiled from his bird camera.

The video showed a gazebo-style bird feeder in sandstone color, dangling from a raised platform in an outdoor location enshrouded by dense Thuja trees. The trees seemed to be rustling, indicating that there was wind flowing at the time the clips were captured. The glass casing of the feeder revealed that it was filled with bird food, most likely sunflower seeds, as the user mentioned. About 17 seconds into the video, a tiny bird, likely to be a marsh tit or willow tit, glided into the scene and perched on the feeder. The coal-breasted tit started nibbling on the seeds spilled in the tray of the feeder by repetitive holding and cracking movements. More tits kept coming and going.

In response to his post, hundreds of Reddit users flocked to the comments section to reassure him that this messy-eating behavior was normal among the bird community. “I'm in the US. We have tons of Chickadees and Nuthatches that do the same thing. I have Mourning Doves and a few other types of birds that really enjoy the seeds that are dropped. There is usually very little left over,” shared u/Chickadee12345. Another person said, “My tits do the same. They threw seeds in their water bowl.”

Several of them brought attention to the fact that most tits are picky eaters. “They pick up and weigh the peanuts and sunflower seeds they want. They also seem to be ‘getting a feel for’ each one to determine which best fits in their beak. They’ll pick up three or four before choosing the ‘right’ one, weigh each one, and drop them if they don’t want it,” said u/CharleyNobody.