Can You Feed Bread to Wild Birds? Here's What Experts Have to Say

While it can be fun to stock your bird feeder with delicious seeds for your backyard flock, it's important to ensure the snacks you provide won't negatively impact their health. For example, can you safely mix common foods like bread and rice with normal bags of seed to better attract birds? Should you carry slices of bread in your pocket when out birding?

Some enthusiasts are even turning to unconventional methods to attract birds to their feeders. Here's what you should know about whether certain common foods are safe for wild birds to consume.

The answer is two-pronged: technically, birds can eat bread, but no, you should not feed bread to birds. According to an expert-reviewed article in Birds & Blooms, giving bread to birds may put their health at risk.

“We discourage people from feeding bread to birds, as there are far too many potential risks," Kenn and Kimberly Kaufman told Birds & Blooms.

Among those risks is moldy bread, which could upend a bird's health and put them at risk for any number of illnesses. Furthermore, if the slivers of bread you feed to birds haven't been made small enough, the bread might pose a choking hazard to them — or become lodged within the digestive tract and cause a blockage.

According to a veterinarian-authored and reviewed article in PetMD by Chewy, juvenile birds could be severely harmed with "growth deformities" due to the lack of sufficient nutrients from consuming too much bread.

Birds may even become dependent on humans for bread, which weakens their ability to forage for food on their own, per the Carolina Wildlife Center.

From a deformity called "angle wing" (more commonly known as "angel wing") that prevents proper flying mechanics to weight gain and malnourishment, giving bread to birds can cause a litany of problems that may ultimately cause their death, the Carolina Wildlife Center warns.

“A regular diet of bread products fed to waterfowl can cause serious harm," the Kaufmans told Birds & Blooms. "So if birds consume bread on a regular basis, the lack of nutrients causes vitamin deficiencies that lead to serious, even fatal health issues.”

Not only can birds eat rice, they often prefer raw, uncooked rice. Dr. Alfredo Begazo, Ph.D., of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes in Avian Report that uncooked rice does not swell in a bird's stomach, despite a longstanding popular myth that asserts the opposite. In fact, per Avian Report, birds consume rice often.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that baby birds would choke on rice, as the parent bird will have crushed the grain into a manageable size.

Of course, rice should never be fried or seasoned before feeding it to birds. A host of problems could arise, given the fat, salt, and other harmful contents of rice that has been cooked, so it is probably safest to offer uncooked, raw brown rice to wild birds instead.