[sarah1983jane]

I really fancy some more wild bird feeders but the price of them is really putting me off!

Does any one have any ideas for some DIY feeders?

Thanks

[arugula]

There could be some great ideas, this should be interesting!

We've made a sort of suet cake, for want of a better word, in the past where you melt the suet to liquid in an enamel dish or similar and then fill it to what seems like saturation point with wild bird seed. Once cooled and solidified, you can either put it out in little bits or the furred wildlife would probably eat it overnight, or use small dishes (or half coconut shells ) and put string or wire in whilst it is liquid - a bit like adding the wick to a candle.

[RichardA]

similar to the suet cake above but drill largish holes in a  log, say inch or two inch dia and same deep, stuff holes with suet cake mix and hang from trees - attracts woodpeckers and tits etc
R

[Spana]

Heres two I made earlier 

The second one was made to hold poultry grit but can be filled with bird seed and tied to a tree or fence. 
Both work well but are easily trashed by squirrells.

[bainsk8]

Spana, I like both of these but the grit one I could use with my Chooks. What a great idea, thank you for posting up. 

[Kleftiwallah]

Wickes, B&Q etc,  all do square meters of various size mesh and you can make ooodles of feeders for not a lot.

Cheers,   Tony.

[sarah1983jane]

Fab, I am going to go for a walk to find some logs I can dill out to fill with suet cake tomorrow! Love the plastic feeders....will be saving up milk bottled and yoghurt pots. Thank You

[bainsk8]

Fab, I am going to go for a walk to find some logs I can dill out to fill with suet cake tomorrow! Love the plastic feeders....will be saving up milk bottled and yoghurt pots. Thank You

How did you get on with your log feeder?

I made one this morning after reading your post. We had a tree come down a few week ago which I thought would make a great place to start. Here is the results.



I put the roof on to stabilise the log and stop the suet mix from being washed out. I also made a plate for the back out of a small piece of sheet metal which I drilled a key hole for the screw to sit in when hanging.



Mrs bainsk8 and myself are very happy with the results, we just hope the birds are. I still have to make a grit dispenser for the chooks.

The suet mix I made is as follows:

Sunflower Seed
Meal worm
Oats
Suet

Does anyone have another recipe for us to try? We had thought about adding some Raisins and will do this next time.

[arugula]

I'll be interested to see how you get on with oats in your mix, as we found our wild birds didn't particularly seem to like them. They prefer straight wild bird seed, which we buy in larger bags 12 point something kg or 20 where available locally to us.

[bainsk8]

Yes I will report back. I didn't want to use wild bird seed because we used it in one of the other feeders and the birds never touched it, same with peanuts. They do go made for Sunflower kernels. The neighbour recommended peanut butter, but we have to buy this in to try it.

[arugula]

That's interesting, how do you present the peanut butter?

[bainsk8]

I guess you would use it instead of the suet, messy business! That said it would be interesting to see if the birds eat it especially after not touching the peanuts.

We do have hedge sparrows in the area and it would be nice to find something they would like.

[arugula]

Our main garden flock here is house sparrers. We have dunnock too among others, but they are shy.

[bainsk8]

I just had to Google search 'dunnock' not only have not seen them but I had never heard of one before.

I must confess my knowledge of birds is very limited and I would probably mistake the dunnock if I saw one as a sparrow. I would need to get the binoculars out and keep flicking through the pages of our little Observer book to get it right. That said we were uncertain if the Goldfinches we get in the garden were indeed Goldfinches or a member of the Tit family, 8doubles corrected us on that one in another post on the forum. Silly mistake now looking again at the Observer book.

[arugula]

Yes dunnock is hedge sparrow.