Tips About Pets

Sure you can buy wild bird food, sometimes for BIG $'s, but there are hundreds of family handed-down homemade recipes for you to make on your own.

Many of these recipes include ingredients you will have laying around the house. This saves you BIG $'s.

Most birds will eat many things. The recipe(s) we have collected for each bird are some of their preferred food selections. Here are two examples:

Oriole

There are 2 very easy recipes for Orioles.

Great project for 3 year old or older - with supervision

Complexity - Easy

Time to Complete - 10 minutes

Main Ingredient - An Orange or Jelly

Needed - Orange or Jelly

Step 1 - This is one of the easiest of all! All that is needed is half an orange. Nail the orange to a deck railing, bird feeder, or other location where the Orioles can easily perch.

Step 2 - Another easy recipe is to place a dish of jelly in a similar location. We have found Orioles prefer jelly over jam, which may be thicker and not to their liking.

Note- Both methods work great. Placing the food under a cover (such as a feeder with a roof) will make it last much longer. Just make sure the orioles have enough room to move freely.

Dark-Eyed Junco

(Peanut Butter treat)

Great project for 5 year old or older - with supervision

Complexity - Medium

Time to Complete - 15 minutes

Main Ingredient - Peanut Butter

Needed - Tupperware sandwich holder

- Peanut Butter, mixed bird seed, chopped nuts, rolled oats, cracked corn and/or oatmeal

Step 1 - Junco's prefer to eat from flat feeders, so we will oblige. The sandwich dish can be filled and placed outside until empty (you will want to keep this dish for the birds from that time on, or you can use it as a mold and place the food in the feeder without the dish. If you want the dish back, then you can line the inside with cooking grease, fill the dish, then place in the freezer for 1 hour. At that point, it will pop right out.

Step 2 - Using a small bowl (not your feeder dish) add enough peanut butter so that it would fill approximately 1/2 of your feeder dish. Then add 1/2 of the remaining ingredients, mixing well.

Step 3- Using a small plate, spread out a thin layer of the remaining 1/2 of the dry ingredients.

Step 4- Now dig out the mixture and cup it in your hands, much like making a snowball. Roll the 'ball' over the seed mixture on the plate, giving it a good coating. Then form the entire 'ball' into your sandwich dish. From here you can take it outside or place in the freezer.

Enjoy!