Why not make your own fat balls for the birds?
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Discoveries, General care, Wildlife | 74 comments
Watching the birds feeding just outside the kitchen windows gives me enormous pleasure. Since the bird eating cat that used to lurk in our front garden has moved away there are many more ground feeding birds and quite often I spot mice collecting seeds. Mice in the shrubs are fine. When they come into the house they are a problem.We give the birds mixed seed and fat balls all year. We only put out peanuts in the colder non nesting months as baby birds can choke on peanuts. Finally my large tub of fat balls for the birds has run out. So I decided to make my own. My friend Bunty, pours off all her warm leftover fat into flat plastic containers and she strings these up for the birds. This works well in the depths of winter when it is freezing outside. I tried it once in the summer and the fat melted in the sunshine.
I had a bit of a sniff about on the Internet and discovered that lard or suet seems to be a good fat base for home made fat feeders. There is an interesting thread in the Wild About Britain forum with several recipes and useful suggestions such as adding raisins to the mixture.
I found an old coconut feeder knocking about in the barn. We buy wild bird seed in 25 kilo sacks. So I filled the half coconut shell with mixed seeds and poured the melted lard over the seed. I put it in the fridge to harden. It hangs in a sunny spot and has not melted. Lard is cheap, and the massive sacks of bird seed are under ?10. So this homemade mixture is so much cheaper than the commercially produced balls.
Yesterday I spotted a coconut in the supermarket. After we have gorged on coconut I plan to use the shells to make two more reusable bird fat feeders.
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Hi Clare,
That’s a brillant idea. Thanks!
Hi,
I’m planning on using old tennis balls cut in half to make these bird feeders.
Hi Jacqui
A good place to by giant sack of birdseed is a lerge pet emporium, such as Pets at Home or Scampers (I don’tknow whether these exist in Lancaster). Big garden centres also sell big sacks of birdseed too. It might be worth ringing to check first.
Hi where is a good place to buy sacks of the bird seeds tho? I live in Lancaster – thanks
Hi A sack of wild bird seed mix 20Kg is £9:99 free P&P from farmandpetsplace.co.uk
Hi Susan,
The paper cup idea is great. Thanks for dropping by and leaving the tip.
Hi All – I plan to make these fat balls for bird-feeding for a gardening project for children in my area during the school hols – you dont really need a cocnut if you cant afford/get hold of them – all you need is a pce of string stuck thru a disp paper cup and then set them in the fridge. Thats how we did it for our playgroup abt a million light years away, or seems that way anyway! Great site.
Great idea, Amanda. You could pre melt the lard, heated and cooled is softer than the stuff straight from the pack. The kids could press the seeds etc into the lard. A bit of the hot lard that I was using dribbled out of the hole where the string is tied and when it had set I just scooped it up and put it into the shell. It didn’t melt in the sunshine.
The birds love the coconut feeder. The little shell doesn’t last long. The coconut that I bought is still waiting to be transmogrified into a couple of larger bird cafés.
We are going to make some of these for definite! Maybe even a lot of them… There are sacks of coconuts left over from the school summer fair (they have a traditional coconut shy). I had planned on buying some of the sacks and using the coconut shy for the boys birthday parties in the summer. It would be really cool if we split the coconuts and all the children made some bird feeders to take home. Nice and different to the plastic bags full of tat!
I found the coconut in the tropical fruit section of Waitrose. Thanks for dropping by.
Thanks for the tip. I ran out of fat balls a while ago so I’ll have a go at making these. I don’t think I’ve ever seen coconuts in the supermarket though, maybe I just haven’t been looking!