January 2019 – Feeding the Birds

We are blessed with an abundance of birds around here. This time of year the cardinals congregate on the bird feeder, the wrens and snow birds flit around and we still see an occasional woodpecker. It’s not the time of year for the bluebirds or the goldfinches – they add their color to the flock in the summer.

The ones that stick around all year long have become accustomed to being well fed. Chris keeps the bird feeders full for the birds, and the dried corn gadget is full for the squirrels. But this time of year, with cold weather looming, they need an extra treat.

Our neighbors recently butchered their cows and gave us a considerable amount of the fat – the suet. We ground it up, cooked it down to get the impurities out, mixed it with birdseed and some corn meal – and now our birds are eating Gourmet suet blocks.  They say Thank You with their chirping and flitting (and even fighting – while they try to get to the last crumbs – until the next block of suet arrives).

img_2011
We ground up the beef fat.
img_2012
Cooked it until it melted.
img_2013
Strained out all the particles
img_2017
Added some cornmeal and bird seed and let it harden in some sheet pans.
img_2018
And cut it into blocks the perfect size to fit in those suet feeders – Happy Birds!

2 thoughts on “January 2019 – Feeding the Birds

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s