![]() ![]() Transfer the dough to a wax paper or parchment-lined baking sheet.In the end, you should have a nice sticky ball of suet dough. Overall, you want to make sure the cornmeal and flour are mixed throughout to help hold everything together. Don’t worry if there are chunks of lard that aren’t perfectly mixed in.Using your hands, mix everything together and incorporate all the dry ingredients well. In a large mixing bowl, add the lard, crunchy peanut butter, cornmeal, flour and add-ins.Gloves (optional, but makes the process less messy).2-4 cups total of your preferred add-ins.16 oz natural (no sugar added) crunchy peanut butter.The birds can’t taste the capsaicin, so it doesn’t bother them. To keep squirrels out of your suet, mix in a tablespoon of red pepper flakes to a batch of suet. Dried mealworms or black soldier fly larva.Dried fruit pieces such as apples, blueberries or cranberries (no sugar added).Using a few add-ins will also give you a sturdier block of suet that will hold its shape better. You can make this suet recipe up as is or mix in a few of these add-ins for extra energy and to make the cakes more appealing. It’s better to keep suet out during the cooler months of the year. And the heat causes the suet to melt, or worse, go rancid, causing a mess to clean up that’s no longer good for the birds to eat. By this time of year, plenty of natural food sources are available to the local bird population. ![]() We take our suet feeder down in the summer. It’s a good thing you can make several batches and freeze them. Once you get regular visitors, keep your suet feeder filled otherwise, you’ll have to start the process all over again. It can take a while for word to spread among the feathered folk in your area where the good food is. You’ll likely find nuthatches, chickadees, flickers, woodpeckers, blue jays, wrens, goldfinches, titmice, cardinals and brown thrashers.īe patient if you’re just setting up your feeder and don’t see many birds visiting. Quite a few birds appreciate a suet feeder. (They’ll melt in the warmer months.) Don’t forget to make a hole for a string before you put them in the freezer. You can even smash some of the mix into cookie cutters and freeze them to make hanging suet treats in the winter. I sliced mine into squarish rectangles, but you can easily roll these into balls or other shapes to fit whatever type of suet feeder you have. Keep them as simple as you want, or go all out and make up a deluxe suet treat. But you can add extra ingredients to make the cakes more appealing. You might already have them in your pantry. These suet cakes use a base recipe that only requires four easy-to-find ingredients. (I mixed this batch up on the back porch in the snow!) Plenty of commercially made suet cakes are available, but making your own means you can control the quality of the ingredients and choose your own extra additions to attract specific types of birds. For a quick and fun project, you can easily make your own suet cakes at home. ![]() (Check out Cherly’s excellent tutorial on how to render tallow.) Access to high-energy foods is especially important in the cold months when other natural food resources are scarce. Suet feeders allow birds access to quality high-fat foods, such as lard, tallow (birds easily digest animal fats) or nut butters. Most of the seeds in commercially available birdseed blends are high in fat sunflower, safflower and nyjer. Think of how quickly they move and the energy required for all that flitting about, compared to their overall size, and it’s no wonder they consistently need high-energy food sources to keep them going. With their high metabolic rates, these tiny creatures need high-fat food content. Setting up suet feeders is a great way to attract birds to your backyard. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |