I tried putting chilli powder on my bird table and was surprised at the result

My neighbours must be used to it by now. Every few days, I wander into my garden holding something odd and take photos of it in front of my bird table. Sometimes it’s a bag of rice , sometimes it’s a potato , sometimes I’m just laying dog food in the grass, or trying to put coffee on my raised beds .

I’m probably known as the eccentric oddball who takes pictures of objects on his lawn at this point. It’s all for a good cause, though - feeding the birds. And one hot tip I’ve been pushing on Express readers for many months is chilli powder on bird tables , so I decided it was finally time to put my money where my mouth is and put it to the test first-hand.



The theory goes that chilli powder is the best thing to sprinkle across bird feeders or bird tables, because it protects bird food from being eaten by non-winged wildlife. Birds will gobble it up, but squirrels and foxes can’t stand the taste. It’s some quirk of nature that means birds can’t taste spicy foods like other animals can.

It means that nasty grey squirrels, which often eat bird eggs as well as food left out for birds, can’t steal vital sustenance which birds really need. Bird numbers are under threat in recent years. People have paved over their gardens , cut down trees, removed hedges and replaced wooden fencing for plastic.

At the same time, modern gardeners trim lawns like football pitches, shower flowers in bug spray and remove weeds and wild flowers in favour of non-native plants. Taken together, these kind of changes make it harder for birds to live and nest, and reduce insect populations, meaning birds have less to eat. Taken together with the loss of green land - think bulldozed woods, tarmacked parks - and the ever more volatile weather, and it’s no wonder birds are finding things tough.

That’s why I try to encourage people to help birds in their gardens as much as possible, to try to prop up the ecosystem just a little. I’m not winning any Pulitzer prizes but at least I’m doing something to make the world slightly better, right. Well it helps me sleep better anyway.

So I went out into the garden earlier this week and topped up my bird table. I then liberally poured a mound of Aldi's finest chilli powder across the seed and mealworm mix that robins, bluetits and finches have been snacking on for the past few weeks. To be honest, I was half expecting the world to make me look stupid, and to find that it would be untouched, a dismal failure, or worse, that there'd be some sick finch coughing and spluttering next to the feeder, engorged with chilli flakes while a squirrel wolfs down his lunch next to him.

I came back the next morning and to my surprise, all of the mealworm mix was gone, and so was every last bit of the chilli powder. And not a squirrel in sight. As an added bonus, I did not find piles of ailing robins slumped across the grass nearby, so it appears to be safe for the birds without any unexpected surprises.

So the verdict is: yes it really does work - so don’t be afraid to spice things up in the garden to keep your birds happy..