Cooking Fat Bird Feeders

This is a great way to use up your old cooking fat and in winter makes a welcome treat for your garden birds.

This projects also a quick and easy to keep the kids happy, while making them aware of the nature in the garden.

Collect all your fat from your roast dinners for the year instead of throwing it away or blocking up the drains. We use an old lemonade bottles that I leave near the bins outside to collect our fat and we have this useful funnel that screws onto the top from the local water company to encourage people not to put there old fat down the drains.

All you need is:-

• Old cooking Fat
• Old 2 liter Lemonade bottles
• Knife
• Old container to mix everything up in (ice cream tub)
• Hot water
• Bird seed / Mealworms / Old bread crumbs / peanuts
• Twine / strong string

Cut the bottoms off the lemonade bottles to create cups. I would advise also creating two holes about an inch apart in the top lip of the cup now for the string later.

Melt the old fat in a bath of warm water until its fully liquid.

When we are collecting the fat we try not to collect an with water in it as this makes the end feeder too soft.

Now mix the liquid fat with the different feeds until there is a good portion of feed in there, you don’t want just fat.

Once proper mixed and, pour the mixture into the bottle bottoms (don’t lick your fingers!) and let it all cool down and solidify

Then leave them out for the birds, you can just leave them out flat or string them up into the trees.