The 2026 bird feeding change: what happened, who disagrees, and what we'd do

If you have fed garden birds for any length of time, the advice you learned is now out of date. In 2026 the RSPB changed its guidance, the BTO agreed with it, and the RHS adopted it — and almost nothing else on the British internet has caught up. The page you land on from a search is likely to be four or six years old and confidently wrong.

That puts you in an awkward position, because the two groups shouting loudest about this both have something at stake. The charities have a position to defend. The bird food companies have stock to shift. So here is the whole thing laid out: what changed, how strong the evidence actually is, what the objectors say and what they sell, and what we would do. We sell nothing on this page.

What changed

The guidance is called Feed Safely, Feed Seasonally. In short:

• Pause seeds and peanuts from 1 May to 31 October. Put them back out from 1 November to 30 April.
• Suet, fat balls and mealworms are still fine all year, in small amounts.
• Stop using flat feeders — bird tables, window feeders, anything with a tray. The RSPB says these carry the greatest risk of disease transmission, and in December 2025 its own shops suspended selling them.
• Clean feeders and baths at least weekly, with hot soapy water and disinfectant.
• Move the feeder to a different spot every week.
• Change bath water daily.

The last three are the ones people skip, and they may matter more than the seasonal rule. More on that below.

Why: a disease, not a fashion

The driver is trichomonosis, a parasite that infects a bird’s throat until it can no longer swallow. It appeared in British finches around 2005 and spread fast, because a feeder is a place where many birds put their beaks in the same spot on the same day.

The numbers are genuinely bleak. Greenfinches have fallen over 65% in the last three decades — a bird that used to be on every feeder in Britain was put on the UK Red List in 2021 because of this disease. Chaffinches lost 39% between 2012 and 2022. The RSPB says greenfinch declines “could be the largest scale mortality of British birds due to infectious disease on record”.

The parasite does not survive cold well, which is why the pause covers the warm half of the year and the feeding window is the cold half.

How strong is the evidence? Weaker than the headlines, stronger than the objections

This is the part almost nobody writes down, so: the seasonal pause is a precautionary measure, not a proven one.

The RSPB says so itself. Its own explanation is that it “aims to avoid risks when the impact is uncertain, and preliminary findings of the ongoing scientific review suggested they could present the highest risk”. The review — RSPB, BTO and the Zoological Society of London working together — is ongoing. The BTO, which agrees with the headline advice, is openly less certain about the second-order questions.

So the honest summary has three parts, and you need all three:

1. The disease is real and the population crash is real. That is not in dispute by anyone, including the companies that sell bird food.
2. Feeders concentrate birds, and concentration spreads it. Also not in dispute.
3. Whether a six-month national pause is the right response — as opposed to, say, much harder enforcement of weekly cleaning — is a judgement call made under uncertainty.

Reasonable people can disagree about point 3. They are disagreeing about the response, not the disease.

Who disagrees, and what they sell

The bird food trade pushed back publicly. Their argument, fairly stated, is that the science was reduced to a “stop feeding birds” headline, that a precautionary position was presented as settled certainty, that the moment was an opportunity to teach people about hygiene rather than to frighten them, and that the specialist industry was not meaningfully consulted. Haith’s, one of the oldest bird food companies in the country, put it as panic not helping birds while responsible feeding does.

Some of that lands. The hygiene point in particular is strong: a filthy feeder in November is a disease risk too, and the seasonal rule does not fix it.

But here is the thing we would want told to us, so we will tell it to you: the companies making this argument sell bird seed, and the rebuttals we read did not say so. Haith’s response does not disclose anywhere on the page that it is written by a bird food retailer. That does not make the argument wrong. It does mean you are reading advocacy, not advice, and you were not told which you were getting.

For completeness, the other side has a commercial position too — the RSPB runs shops. It is worth noting that it moved against its own retail interest, suspending sales of the flat-surface feeders its guidance now advises against.

What we would actually do

Follow the RSPB and BTO. Not because charities are automatically right, but because when a population has already fallen by two thirds, “wait for better evidence” is a bet with someone else’s bird.

Practically, from today:

• In the summer half of the year, take the seed and peanut feeders down, and keep the suet, the mealworms, and above all the water going. Small amounts.
• In the winter half, put everything back, and treat cleaning as the job rather than the afterthought.
• All year round, be ruthless about hygiene. Weekly clean, weekly move, daily water. If you do only one thing from this page, do this — it is the part of the advice the objectors and the charities actually agree on.
• If you see a sick bird — fluffed up, lethargic, struggling to swallow, wet plumage around the bill — stop feeding entirely for two to four weeks so the flock disperses, and report it to Garden Wildlife Health.

And if you are buying seed in August because it is cheap: fine. Buy it for November.

The bit the charities can’t say, and we can

We are a gardening site, so here is the gardener’s answer to a six-month pause.

Your garden can feed birds without a feeder, and the food it grows carries no disease risk at a shared plastic port. Seedheads left standing through autumn feed finches. Berries feed thrushes through winter. Windfall apples under a tree in October are a banquet for blackbirds and, if you are lucky, redwings and fieldfares. Rose hips do the same job if you resist deadheading in autumn. Leave the lavender seedheads up instead of cutting them back tidily in September and goldfinches will work them over.

None of that needs a feeder, a subscription, or a pause. It is also the thing the RHS moved towards when it adopted the new guidance in May 2026 — and it is the reason we think this change is less of a loss than it first reads.

One thing that is not currently a problem

Avian influenza gets raised every time garden feeding comes up. As things stand, the UK self-declared freedom from highly pathogenic avian influenza on 18 May 2026 and the Avian Influenza Prevention Zone was lifted on 4 June 2026. The risk to wild birds is officially low and feeding garden birds is fine — wash your hands afterwards. Autumn is historically when restrictions return, so we check this page’s sources regularly and will say plainly here if that changes.

How we checked this

• RSPB, Feed Safely, Feed Seasonally — the current guidance, page dated 24 July 2026. rspb.org.uk
• RSPB, The science of bird feeding — the decline figures, the precautionary framing and the December 2025 shop decision. rspb.org.uk
• BTO, feeding FAQs — the aligned position. bto.org
• BTO, trichomonosis. bto.org
• Garden Wildlife Health, Feeding garden birds: best practice — the never-offer list, the hygiene routine, and the stop-feeding protocol when sick birds appear. gardenwildlifehealth.org
• GOV.UK, Bird flu: latest situation in England, page updated 20 August 2026. gov.uk
• Haith’s, response to the 2026 guidance — quoted as a position, not as a source. haiths.com

Our own interest: elsewhere on this site we earn commission on some products, and we label those links. There are no affiliate links on this page and we earn nothing from it. When we do recommend bird food, our recommendations follow this guidance rather than the selling season — that is the whole point of the notice at the top of the page.

Confidence: the disease and the population decline are established fact. The six-month seasonal pause is a precautionary judgement made by the RSPB and BTO under acknowledged uncertainty, and we have said so rather than presenting it as settled. Checked against RSPB, BTO, Garden Wildlife Health and GOV.UK on 20 September 2026.