My daughter and I have started watching and identifying birds that come to the bird feeders in my back yard. I think we are up to 14 different varieties in just a couple of days! We decided that we would like to attract woodpeckers, so we bought a bird suet feeder and a no-melt suet cake. It works great but is quite expensive. We started searching the internet and came up with a no-melt suet recipe that we adapted and made yesterday. It is July in Texas, so the “no-melt” feature is very important. It is a lot cheaper and the birds seem to like it.

We have a lot of squirrels in our area, so we added cayenne pepper to the mixture. The owner of a bird feed store in Austin explained to us that birds do not have taste buds but squirrels do. Adding cayenne pepper discourages the squirrels but does not affect the birds. Great idea! Otherwise, our suet would be eaten by the squirrels in a couple of hours!

Here is our recipe adapted from several we found on the internet:

2 cups lard
2 cups crunchy peanut butter
4 cups quick cook oats
4 cups cornmeal
3 cups flour
6 tablespoons cayenne pepper
1 cup raisins

We pressed this mixture into a couple of metal cake pans and set them in the freezer for a short time to set up. After that we sliced them to fit our feeder. The size we needed was approximately 4″ x 4″ x 1″.

And then we sat on the porch and watched all the birds come to our suet feeder…

Technorati Tags: recipe, bird, birds, suet, bird suet, bird suet recipes, suet recipes, bird feed

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