Attracting birds to your garden has many benefits, and the greater the variety of feeders you have up, the greater the variety of birds you'll see. Suet feeders attract birds my seed feeders won't but I've avoided suet feeders for a long time since suet {the link has a pretty gross picture of fat, so if you're squeamish just trust me on this} is rendered beef fat, a byproduct I assume largely comes from industrial farms.
This week I decided to change my suetless status and add a different kind of feeder to my birdy buffet: I made a log suet feeder with hardware I had on-hand, a log from the firewood pile, and food from my kitchen.
For the feeder I used: a drill, a 1 1/2" drill bit, a phillips screwdriver bit, the aforementioned log, sturdy chain (squirrels will chew through rope to get the goodies on the ground), a swivel clip to keep the chain from kinking (optional), a wood screw to attach the chain to the log (an eye hook would also work).
Drill plenty of holes in the log--you don't want to go all the way through, you want them about 1 inch deep. Make plenty of them--the more holes you have to fill the less filling up you'll have to do. Yep, it's that simple.
Make a loop at one end of the chain so you can loop it over a branch or snag, then attach the chain to the top of the log. I just screwed right through a link in the chain with a wood screw coated for outdoor use.
I'm still not ready to go out and buy suet, but I found plenty of online recipes for suet substitute. Should you have leftover fat from a beef based dinner you can make your own suet, but I'm not one to mess with meat, so I went for a protein-packed, vegetarian "suet" substitute: peanut butter. Many recipes suggest peanut butter and corn meal, which is what I did, but I also added some bird seed just like we used to do with pine cones in kindergarten. You just stir it all up adding the corn meal and seed until the mixture will clump but is not sticky like straight up peanut butter.
Stuff the mixture in the holes and voila!
Now you're ready to find a tree branch and hang up your new feeder!
There is no doubt in my mind squirrels will find the nutty goodness, but that's okay, there will be birds, too. According to the Audobon Society, peanut butter will attract: woodpeckers, jays, chickadees, titmice, bushtits, nuthatches, brown creepers, wrens, kinglets, northern mockingbirds, brown thrashers, starlings, and yellow-rumped and pine warblers.
Renee
Garner has a passion to make things grow, although her brownish
thumb wants her to believe otherwise. When mud pies aren't on the menu,
you can find her doodling the days away at Wolfie and the
Sneak.
