Homemade Bird Food Can Be Nutritious and Green Sheffield
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Homemade Bird Food Can Be Nutritious and Green
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.
Commercial wild bird food can be expensive. Using some of your nutritious, organic food scraps can help make the bought bird feed go further.
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.
Picture above: Seagulls will eat almost anything. This black-headed gull is about to attack last night's pasta bake.
Homemade bird food:
An easy bird cake recipe
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.
Homemade Bird Food: Recipe for Bird Cake
A selection of 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Take the pot and make a small hole in the bottom.
- Thread the string up through the pot.
- Tie the twig onto the string at the open (top) end of the pot. This will be the perch.
- When the fat has cooled to a lukewarm temperature, mix it into the other ingredients.
- Carefully spoon the mixture into the pot around the string.
- Leave in a cool place until completely cold and set hard.
- Slowly turn the pot upsidedown so the twig is at the bottom, and pull the pot off the set mixture.
- 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 tric...
