Fill Coconut Halves With Homemade Winter Bird Food

This project lets you help our little feathered friends survive through the winter. By mixing bird seed, oats, raisins, sunflower seeds, plain peanuts, etc... with coconut lard, you can fill coconut halves and hang them outdoors for the birds to enjoy. Also if you have birds in your garden, it is important to put fresh water (room temperature) out for them to drink (and some will even splash in it). When the water starts to freeze up, try to replace it as often as you can.

For this project you will need: The amount of ingredients listed below will fill about 4-5 coconut halves. Each coconut half has a different size so as a rule of thumb, each coconut half will need approximately 50-75 grams of bird food, 50-75 grams of coconut lard and 50-75 grams of oats.

- 4-5 cleaned out coconut halves
- drill with bit
- rope for hanging
- about 200 grams of purchased winter bird food plus about 50 grams of raisins, sunflower seeds, cranberries, peanuts, etc...
  (for U.S. residents, use a cup)
- about 250 grams (a cup) of coconut lard
- about 250 grams of dried oats (about a cup) if you want the mixture to be thicker (the birds really love it, too)

Instructions: 1. Clean out the coconut halves and drill a hole in each half. Then insert a rope piece through each half, knotting the two ends inside the coconut. Make sure the knot is larger than the hole. This will create a loop for hanging. 2. Then make a mixture of food for the birds. Add extra nuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, winter bird food seeds, etc. The weight of the mixture should equal the weight of the lard you use. 3. Then warm up the coconut lard just enough to melt it. Do not let the lard boil. 4. Stir the bird seed mixture into the liquid. You can now leave the mixture as is or you can add oats to the mixture to make it thicker so the birds will have more to eat. The birds love the oats, too. Then fill the coconut halves with the warm mixture. Place the coconut halves onto a plate and then into the refrigerator, so the mixture will harden. Usually it takes a couple of hours or overnight. 5. Once hardened, the coconut halves can be hung outdoors. We usually hang 2-3 out for the birds. The remaining coconut halves remain in the refrigerator until needed. 6. Not all coconuts are the same size so the mixture made may be more than enough to fill the coconuts. You can either fill more coconut halves with it (if you have them available and prepared) or you can fill silicone baking forms with them to create bird food cakes for the birds. These can be placed into the bird feeding house or station. You can also create this Winter Bird Food Project with the mixture as well.

Just a few of the many different hungry visitors we have had so far!

A beautiful woodpecker from a nearby forest comes regularly to visit.

The Eurasian Blue Tit shows up every morning for a treat.

The Great Tit always plucks out the sunflower seeds.

A nuthatch showed up one evening just before dark to get a bite before retiring for the night.

The biggest surprise to see was the robin at the coconut early one morning. This cute bird mostly looks on the ground for food. This picture was a lucky capture, though not too sharp. The robin came and left again so fast that the there was not time to focus on the bird correctly.

There is an abundance of tree sparrows here and they come regularily to the coconuts for a bite. There was still a little bit of food in this one, though you don’t see it in the image. We usually have a couple of extra ones prepared so we can replace empty ones with full ones right away.

It was starting to snow and these two were simutaneously eating. A tree sparrow was waiting in the background for his turn.

Several siskins started to arrive around the middle of February and quickly found the food filled coconuts.

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