It’s been snowy here for three weeks now and we’re making sure there is always a stock of seeds & nuts available for our local wildlife population. We know that it can be dangerous feeding wildlife too regularly – they become reliant on you and “forget” to find their own food supply, which is a problem if you move away/go away – but for the time being, while their food supply is under a chilly blanket, we’re helping out.

I bought a bird feeder a couple of year ago – a simple wood/metal grill thing – and it was fine in our old house. Here though, the squirrels gnawed the wood and ripped a whole in the metal on Day 1, so I clearly need to make something sturdier. (I don’t mind feeding the squirrels, especially at the moment, but would rather they didn’t break stuff.)

We’ve got some offcuts of wood – small flat pieces of pine, salvaged from a joiner – which I could yoink from the stove’s wood pile and use to make a little box/tray with a roof (probably a hanging one, rather than a table because of the cats). There is always the simple milk bottle option or juice bottles too. Coming at it from another angle, coconut shells or hard gourd skins can be used for homemade fat feeders, and those that plan ahead purposely grow sunflowers during the summer to feed their feather friends during the winter.

Speaking of the actual food, don’t just resort to shop-bought seed mixes – Mrs Green from My Zero Waste has pulled together a great list of waste foods that can help the local wildlife.

How else can you make bird feeders reusing and recycling random stuff?

And what do you feed the birds once you’ve got your feeder in place?

A few weeks ago, on the coconut shells post, I found a very cool way to reuse plastic milk bottles to make covered bird feeders for small birds (UPDATE – the link I had has stopped working, the next best one uses big milk jugs but the same principle applies to smaller bottles too, from a 2pint/1ltr upward).

But as we’ve only got one tree in the garden (and that’s not really a tree, it’s an overgrown bush which is very cat-accessible), I’d love to find out other ways to reuse them rather than just slinging them in the recycling bin.

Any ideas?
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