It’s still cold and so important to help keep our garden wildlife fed. The following are some ideas for making your own bird food and bird feeders. You can repurpose or recycle items already in your home so, why not get the kids involved?
Fat Balls
Birds love energy-rich fat balls, which give them all the calories they need to get through coldwinter days and nights. You can buy them in the shops but they’re easy to make at home.
Fat balls are popular with blue tits, great tits and long-tailed tits, house sparrows, blackbirds, robins, woodpeckers, nuthatches, and blackcaps.
You Will Need:
- Bowl
- Lard or suet
- Saucepan
- Spoon
- String or twine
- Old yoghurt pots
- Unsalted peanuts
- Currants
- Sultanas
- Oats
- Breadcrumbs
- Cake crumbs
- Grated cheese
- The best ratio for this fat ball recipe is one part fat to two parts dry mixture. Mix all your dry ingredients together in a bowl.
- Melt some lard or suet in a pan and add the dry mix. Stir well until the fat has all been absorbed by the dry mixture, and everything sticks together.
- Make a hole in the bottom of a yoghurt pot and thread through a length of twine or string, then pack the pot with your warm fat mixture, to make fat balls.
- Place your fat balls in the fridge overnight to set, then cut through the pot and peel it away. Tie a big knot at one end of the twine to secure the ball.
- Hang the fat ball in a tree or shrub and wait for the birds to come and feast.
How To Create a Homemade Bird Seed Blend
Simply include the healthy ingredients that birds both want and need in their diet.
- 1 Cup Of Black Oil Sunflower Seeds
- 1 Cup of Chopped Plain Peanuts
- 1/2 Cup of Striped Sunflowers
- 1/2 Cup of Cracked Corn
- 1/8 Cup of Dried Fruit
Make a bird feeder tray using the following items in your home
Left over wood
If you have some spare wood lying around the house, why not repurpose it to make a bird feeder? Start by measuring a square piece of wood, 12 inches by 12 inches long, with a notch in one of the corners. Next, take some small lengths of wood and glue them to create a border. Finally, take your feeder to a thin trunked tree so that the notch rests against the bark. Then nail the final bordering wood to attach the tray-like bird feeder to the tree. Fill with birdseed, and you are all done.
½ Orange rind
Make use of those leftover orange peels by turning them into bird feeders. It is effortless and affordable; cut an orange in half, scoop out the fleshy insides, and have them as a snack. Then, pack one-half of the orange with a mixture of birdseed and a little bit of honey or corn syrup to bind them together. Take two wooden skewers and stick them through the orange about an inch below the surface in an “x” formation. Use some string to attach to each end of the skewer, then hang from a tree branch.
Plastic Bottles
Why not make a bird feeder out of your used plastic bottles? No matter the size, take your used plastic bottle and rinse it thoroughly. Once the bottle is dry, use a utility knife to carefully cut out a rectangular hole roughly halfway up the bottle. You want to allow enough space for the bird to get their head in. Then, pour birdseed into the top with a funnel, cap the bottle, attach a string, and hang it from a tree branch.
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