Wild birds enjoy fruit cocktail, apples, oranges, pears, grapefruit, berries, cherries, grapes, and more. You can offer this fruit at home to attract wild birds.

You can offer fruit in several forms -- fresh, dried, jelly, plant, or nectar -- in several ways. The fruit will attract several different species of bird, depending on the form and how you offer it.

Caution

Fruit becomes rancid and unhealthy quickly, so leave fruit out only for short periods of time.

Forms

You can offer fresh fruit like sliced oranges or plums, or dried fruit like soaked raisins or dried cherries. You can also offer grape jelly or other flavors of jelly.

For a more natural method, you can grow strawberries, blueberries, miniature apple trees, miniature orange trees, and more in container plants on your Wildlife Porch.

How to Offer

Fresh, peeled fruits can be offered singly in some feeders, while others allow you to provide fruit along with other food.

Dried fruit is often served in a nut/fruit or mix or as part of a suet cake. Jelly is served up in combo feeders or in simple saucers. Finally, straight off the bush is perhaps the most natural way of offering fruit.

You can even build your own fruit-skewer feeder simply by hanging a small board with long screws and mounting orange halves on the screws.

What Kind

In general, fruit attracts orioles, cardinals, woodpeckers, jays, tanagers, mockingbirds, grosbeaks, thrashers, robins, warblers, and finches.

Jelly attracts catbirds. Cherries attracts bluebirds, cedar waxwings, finches, flickers, mockingbirds, robins, rose-breasted grosbeaks, towhees, vireos.