A Homemade Bird Food from Suet and Scraps from your Table

It's great to feed the birds!

Here's an easy homemade bird food recipe which is suitable for children to make with some supervision.

Homemade bird food is easy to make if you use up some left-overs from your green kitchen and add a few choice elements to keep the birds well fed and happy.

Feeding the birds is a good way of upping your green living, especially if you are using locally sourced, organic foods and scraps for the most part.

You can collect your ingredients gradually, over a day or two. Just keep things secure in your fridge until you are ready, making sure that no-one mistakes them for family food of course! Collect suet and fat from your roasting pan or from frying or grilling meat. Collect bread crumbs, old crackers, left over cooked pasta or rice. Don't keep anything which is rancid or at all mouldy.

Homemade bird food: Here is a recipe I was given recently. It's a bit similar to one we used when I was a child. It certainly keeps the backyard and garden birds coming back for more.

This recipe is suitable for a child to make.

Adult supervision should of course be given for the heating of the ingredients.

Half a cup of lard, suet or other hard fat. A combination of any of these left-over ingredients:- breadcrumbs, cookies, stale cake, sunflower seeds (hulled), unsalted crushed nuts such as peanuts, grated cheese, bacon rind, apple, pear, and dried fruit such as raisins

You also need an empty yogurt pot, string and a stick or twig wider than the pot.

Homemade bird food: Method

1. Chop up the ingredients and mix them together. Nuts should be chopped finely as small birds such as tits can choke on large pieces of nut.
2. Melt the fat in a pan just enough so that the ingredients can be mixed in. Ask an adult to help as fat can get very hot. Leave the fat to cool.
3. Take the pot and make a small hole in the bottom.
4. Thread the string up through the pot.
5. Tie the twig onto the string at the open (top) end of the pot. This will be the perch.
6. When the fat has cooled to a lukewarm temperature, mix it into the other ingredients.
7. Carefully spoon the mixture into the pot around the string.
8. Leave in a cool place until completely cold and set hard.
9. Slowly turn the pot upsidedown so the twig is at the bottom, and pull the pot off the set mixture.
10. Use the free end of the string to tie to the branch of a tree. Alternatively you can press the cooled mixture into cracks in tree bark - treecreepers and wrens love this!

You could also use that old trick of a half coconut to put the bird cake into.

Another method is to pour your bird cake mixture into muffin tins. Add a strong cotton string to each cake before it cools to provide a hanger.

Homemade bird food: Safety Advice

Make sure you use peanuts which have been grown for birds and never leave them whole - birds can choke on them.

Some less-than-scrupulous merchants may use poor quality nuts. There is a danger that they may contain aflatoxins which are poisonous to birds and humans. So make sure you always buy quality nuts.

Homemade bird food is quite easy to make and it's quite good fun, especially if you can get the kids to make it!

Picture below: Grow sunflowers for the birds. They look great in summer and then in autumn you can expect some acrobatics from the tits and finches.

Click the picture for more on growing plants for the birds - another source of great homemade bird food.

Picture: growing sunflowers is easy and provides a feast for many garden birds

Here are some other ingredients you might like to consider for your homemade bird food mixes. Rather than buy a ready made mix for birds, you can select the ingredients yourself and even create your own special mix to attract the birds you enjoy seeing.

There's a lot of cross-over in what birds will eat, depending upon the season and how hungry they are. But there are ways to encourage particular species, if you wish.

Corn millet This is quite cheap and sparrows and lots of the finch familly appreciate it.

Cracked corn is popular with many species - including squirrels!

Niger seeds You could also buy some specialist foods such as niger seeds (also sometimes known as thistle seeds or spelt "nyger" seeds) to add in the mix.

Siskins, goldfinches and redpolls all enjoy niger seeds.

Safflower seeds have a reputation in north America for attracting the northern cardinal.

Sunflower seeds are immensely popular with many tits and finches and woodpeckers. "Black-oil" sunflower seeds are very good if you can find them. They have large kernels and the shells are thinner than the usual grey striped variety.

Homemade bird food: Organic Bird Food

It is now possible to find sources of organic bird food, though you may need to search on-line to find them.

Here is a supplier in the UK: Vine House Farm They grow a lot of the seeds they sell and they also support the Wildlife Trusts.

You can also use organic kitchen cereals for feeding your garden and backyard birds. For more on organic cereals please see: Healthy cereals for a green kitchen

Some other things to think about.

Rancid fat is a turn off!

Remember that birds eat different things at different times of the year.

Suet and high fat foods are much more important in winter and during cold weather. On the other hand, fats easily become rancid in warm weather as well as being less desirable, so don't put out huge amounts of fatty food in summer and warm weather.

Homemade bird food:

A bit of grit

If you have room, put out a small pile of sand or fine grit. Many birds need suitable grit to help their digestion. In our neighbourhood the sparrows steal the grit left out for winter road gritting. In an urban neighbourhood birds may find it hard to find suitable sources of unpolluted grit. Grit designed for pet cage birds is ideal. Common sand is also OK.

Help them to help themselves

One of the very best ways to help your garden birds to feed themselves is to provide good habitat and natural food sources. You can do this in several ways. Perhaps the main way you can help is by growing good food plants, such as sunflowers (see link and picture above).

Another easy way is to leave quiet corners in your garden for a little wilderness and long grass. Many birds like grass seeds, for example - though of course, you may well be wary of them as potential weed sources!

Wrens and other birds benefit from old logs and shrub trimmings just left in piles. Many species of insect use these as habitat and that in turn helps the birds which feed on them. If you have space for even a small pile of old logs this is a great way to provide both food and shelter for birds.

Picture, right: watercolour of a garden wren. The best homemade bird food for wrens is probably a simple log pile! This shy but vociferous little bird rarely visits the bird table.

Another way to help birds and small mammals is to use clods of earth to form natural banks between areas of your garden. You can make them from weeds and add some wildflower seeds to create a good resource for birds. I've got herbs growing on some of mine. They are easy to create and easy to maintain - provided that you don't want a very clipped and manicured garden!

Be a wild bird feeder! Keep your garden or yard alive with wild birds

From Homemade Bird Food back to Organic Gardening