As it gets colder, our museum starts a winter bird feeding season by placing sixty bird feeders in the Catherine, Alexander and Babolovo Parks of Tsarskoe Selo.

For this purpose, the museum buys nearly 500 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.

Like in previous years, the Old Garden of the Catherine Park near the palace boasts an antique-reproduction bird feeder, which was 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 a simpler 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.

‘In the early 1900s the parks of Tsarskoe Selo saw massive deaths of old trees,’ says Olga Filippova, our parks curator. ‘A special committee of the Imperial Botanic Garden’s specialists set up on the orders of Emperor Nicholas II in 1912 to investigate possible causes 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.'