Why buy from the RSPB?

Because you care about birds, wildlife and the environment.
Every time you buy products from our catalogue, website or shops you are helping birds and wildlife.
We offer a great range of high-quality, environmentally friendly products.
When you shop with the RSPB, 100% of the profit made goes directly to fund vital conservation projects.
All of our bird food and bird care products, such as feeders and nest boxes, have been rigorously tested to ensure that they are free of harmful chemicals and toxins and are as safe and beneficial to birds and wildlife as possible.
Postage and packing is only £3.95 per order and is free if you order only virtual gifts and/or gift membership.
Wherever possible we sell products manufactured in the UK or EU, which means less transportation and less pollution.
Our products are selected with care for quality, value for money and to ensure a limited impact on the environment.
Telephone ordering and assistance is available from our customer service team from 8 am to 8 pm, seven days a week.
You receive great quality products you can trust, and even more money goes to helping birds and wildlife.
You're protected by our no-quibble, 30-day returns policy. And you can return to an RSPB shop if this is more convenient for you.
Ordering via the website is safe and secure.
All timber in products sold by the RSPB is certified FSC timber.

Article from RSPB Birds magazine Nov. 2008 issue: RSPB bird food: It's all for the birds

Nearly all of us feed garden birds. Most people buy special bird food. There are so many brands, some of which used to be associated with the RSPB, it is little wonder that some members are not clear who makes what and where the money goes.

The RSPB has been associated with selling bird food for many years. For two years we have sold our own brand: since the launch of RSPB Bird Care in February 2006, sales have boomed.

RSPB members spend a staggering £70 million on wild bird food every year. Even with the huge growth of our own brand, many members choose other suppliers, often mistakenly thinking that these brands directly support the RSPB.

Before 2006, approved brands used our renowned blue logo as an endorsement, in return for a payment to the RSPB on their sales. Two years ago we stopped this: we no longer endorse or receive money from any other brand on the market.

True, some manufacturers offer you the chance to donate to the RSPB when you buy, and they do pass the money on to us. We are very grateful for this; but you should remember that you are making these donations, not the company you buy from.

If every member who buys bird food chose the RSPB Bird Care brand, we would sell nearly 10 times more than we do now. After production and distribution costs, this would make around £3 million more for RSPB conservation work - that’s enough to buy amile of cliff top for the choughs on Rathlin Island, 750 acres of Nene Washes for corncrakes and lapwings and 365 acres ofBroadland fen in Norfolk - and to still have enough to protect 20,000 acres of rainforest.

What a fantastic thought!

No other brand puts all its profits from bird food, feeders, birdtables and nestboxes to conservation. We can’t know exactly, but we estimate that every pound spent on RSPB bird food would give 10 times more to conservation than any other brand: our earnings go to conservation, not company profits.

We go to great lengths to ensure that our food and feeders are safe and effective, good for birds, of good quality and produced with due consideration for the environment. We do not have our own factories to make and process the foods, but we demand strict criteria to ensure that members get the best value for money and that wildlife and the environment get the maximum possible benefit.

The RSPB’s trading team and our wildlife specialists across the organisation work together to ensure that these guidelines are followed. There are some quite popular products that we do not sell. For example, members have reported birds getting trapped in the plastic mesh nets used to wrap some suet balls - so we do not sell these.

Our criteria include:

All foods and designs are checked by RSPB specialists who understand wildlife and conservation issues.
Whenever we can, we use home produced products, and all our feeds are of known origin, some down to the actual field in which they were grown.
Low-cost feed ingredients which may have more wasteful content, such as excessive levels of husks or dust, or even contain harmful toxins, are never used.
We select food with good nutritional value for garden birds.
We work closely with carefully selected suppliers to ensure their working practices meet our own standards.
We continually review our arrangements to ensure that these standards are maintained.
We will not offer tempting gimmicks that do not benefit the wild birds in your garden.

So why don’t we have our own factory? The RSPB operates within its published sustainability policy, and we plan our business to ensure that energy and resources are used efficiently. By using specialist services which are efficient and shared with other businesses, we believe we have a carbon footprint that is smaller than building our own resources.

RSPB bird food and feeders are available from our reserve shops and you can buy from home, using our web shop or our catalogue. RSPB Bird Care foods are now available in many garden centres, in all branches of Homebase and in some branches of Tesco and Sainsbury’s and also at Pets At Home.

The best value for money are the 12.75 kg sacks, VAT free. Buy them from our reserve shops or by mail-order, online, by telephone or by post. You can also buy loose food in smaller quantities from our reserve shops: this is also VAT free.

See RSPB Shops for a list of RSPB reserve shops, shop online or call 0845 1 200 501*.

(Calls provided by BT will be charged at up to 4p per minute at all times. A call set-up fee of 3p per call applies to calls from residential lines. Mobile and other providers’ charges may vary.)

Article from RSPB Birds magazine February 2008 issue

As consumers, we can all make choices on the ecological impact of the things we buy. Ken Ansdell from the RSPB Trading Team, explains our policies on sourcing bird food.

We are committed to all aspects of conservation, including reducing carbon dioxide emissions and food miles. Where possible, we use locally-sourced ingredients for bird food and we grow and buy as many types of food in the UK as are commercially viable. Unfortunately, not all popular ingredients are grown in the UK, so our next call is Europe, and then further a field as necessary.

Buying peanuts with acceptably low/nil levels of aflatoxin (a toxin produced by a mould that sometimes affects the nuts and can cause death in birds that eat peanuts with aflatoxin) effectively reduces choice of supply to China. We encourage people to switch from providing peanuts for birds, as various seed mixes are more in line with birds’ natural diets.

We have had a considerable amount of UK-grown black sunflowers grown for RSPB bird food in recent years, with varying degrees of success. Low yields, harvesting and drying problems, make UK grown sunflowers more expensive than those grown in France and elsewhere in Europe. We continue to trial new varieties of UK grown sunflowers and hope to overcome the problems and source all black sunflower seed from the UK in the future.

In the mean time, the black sunflower seeds that we get from mainland Europe are shipped by barge from central Europe to Rotterdam and transferred by sea to England, saving many miles of road transport. We have stopped using sunflower hearts from the USA and have converted to European sunflower hearts, which are a good alternative to peanuts.

Other ingredients grown in the UK include millet, canary seed, naked and rolled oats, and some maize. Unfortunately, we have to import raisins and nyjer seed, as there are no suitable UK grown alternatives to these at the moment.

Of all the bird foods on sale in the UK, we believe that the range offered by the RSPB is probably the most carefully formulated and sourced to maximise the benefit to birds and to minimise the impact on the environment.