We’re passionate about birds and nature. That’s why we opened a Wild Birds Unlimited Nature Shop in our community.
5468 Dundas Street West
Toronto (Etobicoke), ON M9B 6E3
Phone: (416) 233-3558
Fax: (416) 233-3293
Email: Send Message
Store Hours:
Mon - Fri: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Sat: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Sun: 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Our seventeen years of providing the best bird feeding products in the GTA has proven to our customers and ourselves that providing your birds an exclusive regionally formulated Wild Birds Unlimited seed blend will ensure the greatest variety of birds to your feeders. But there are times like now when economic concerns may lead you to believe that purchasing inexpensive big box/grocery/pet store seed blends is the only way to continue enjoying your hobby of bird feeding. At first glance this is a reasonable assumption, but these blends consist largely of grains.
Grains are seed types that our birds do not eat but are inexpensive to use. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology "Beware of commercial seed mixes. They’re often a blend of sunflower seeds plus a high proportion of less appealing "filler" such as ... oats, wheat, flax, buckwheat seeds, and red milo. These mixes can be wasteful because the birds pick out the prized sunflower seeds and leave the rest." The National Audubon Society describes milo, wheat and oats,"...Milo, wheat, oats: These agricultural products are frequently mixed into low-priced birdseed blends. Most birds discard them in favor of other food, which leaves them to accumulate under feeders, where they attract rodents..."
Independent studies have indicated many blends sold at other retailers can consist of up to 75% fillers. We conducted a review of the cost of a typical grain based seed blend in the Etobicoke area. We found a 40lb bag could be purchased for $19.97 or $.50/lb. Even if we assume this blend is better than the typical tested blend and consider it to be only 40% filler the cost/lb of actual bird seed that your birds will eat jumps to $.83/lb. What if your blend is 75% filler? Many of the large bag cheap price blends sold in many non birding stores are in that 75% range. Your cost/lb of the actual bird seed you are purchasing increases dramatically. The cost of the bird seed your birds are actually eating increases to a whopping $2.00/lb.
Our double cleaned Premium Black Oil Sunflower seed is ninety-nine percent dust and stick free and is on sale for the month of February for $14.49 for 22lb ($.66/lb) or 44lb for $23.99 ($.55/lb). Even our regular price ($.73/lb or $.59/lb) remains cheaper per pound of actual seed your birds eat than the filler based mix.
So what does this mean? A bag of our black oil sunflower seed is actually cheaper than a filler based blend. You will save money because you will use less bags of seed because your feeders will stay full longer and in the spring there won’t be large pile of uneaten grain seed to clean-up.
Our WBU blends will typically attract a wider variety of birds but our Black Oil Sunflower is definitely the budget choice.
