The park maintenance team of Tsarskoe Selo has placed sixty winter bird feeders in the Catherine, Alexander and Babolovo Parks.

‘In the early 1900s the parks of Tsarskoe Selo saw massive deaths of old trees,’ says Olga Filippova, our park curator. ‘A special committee of the Imperial Botanic Garden’s specialists was set up on the orders of Emperor Nicholas II in 1912 to investigate possible causes and recommended, among other things, feeding birds in winter so they reside in the parks and protect the trees from harmful insects. Winter bird feeders became a tradition we keep today. For this purpose, the Museum buys over 400 kilograms of sunflower seeds every year. Our park maintenance workers, as well as our other employees and visitors, see to that the bird feeders are always full.’

The Old Garden of the Catherine Park near the palace again boasts an antique-reproduction bird feeder first placed there in November 2012. The two-tier bird café, with twelve openings and a decorative porch, replicates a popular design often seen in gardens of Great Britain, France and Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  

Fifty nine other bird feeders of simple design are set all around the three parks. This amount of detached bird feeders on poles, which do not harm tree branches, is enough to take care of practically all the wild birds wintering at Tsarskoe Selo. Those include great, blue, marsh and crested tits, nuthatches, treecreepers, bullfinches, Bohemian waxwings, redpolls, spotted woodpeckers and others. Those garden birds like raw sunflower, watermelon or melon seeds, as well as millet, while tits also like raw salo.Besides feeding on what the bird feeders provide, they carefully inspect the branches and trunks of trees nearby and destroy overwintering pest species.

‘Bird feeders are not our only way of bird care-taking,’ adds Olga Filippova. ‘We also preserve their natural nesting areas, install nest boxes, and plant berry trees and shrubs like hawthorn, rowan and wild rose.’