#Suet feeder how to#
#Suet feeder free#

Northern Cardinal (left) and Pyrrhuloxia (right) visit an apple in an Arizona backyard. Special bluebird feeders that exclude most other birds are available commercially, or plans are available here. Small acrylic window feeders work well if yours has drainage holes, make sure to plug them because mealworms can squeeze through surprisingly tiny spaces. So very many birds will voraciously gobble up mealworms at feeders that offering them is only affordable if you set out a few at a time, at feeders inaccessible to birds you don’t want to subsidize.

#Suet feeder how to#

There’s a lot of excellent information about mealworms on the North American Bluebird Society website and about how to raise them on the Sialis website. Keep them in the coolest place in your house-usually a basement is a great choice-on a surface where the bucket won’t easily get knocked over. Mealworms can’t escape a plastic enclosure such as a bucket as long as there are at least two or three inches of vertical wall between the surface of the medium and the lip. To improve the levels of many nutrients, especially during the nesting season, you can add powdered hand-feeding bird food (the kind marketed as a complete diet for hand-reared baby parrots). Add chunks of raw potato or apple for moisture, and then put the mealworms in. To maintain a large number of mealworms, fill the bottom of an ice cream bucket, dishpan, or similar bin with an inch or two of dry oatmeal or wheat bran. They don’t live long away from an easy supply of food, but few people relish the thought of them, dead or alive, in crevices in their homes.

#Suet feeder free#

It can be tricky to remove them from their packaging-it’s easiest to avoid setting them free in your house if you transfer them from the packaging to your buckets outdoors, or over a very large piece of white paper so you can spot any runaway mealworms before they get far. So make sure to remove them from the paper as quickly as possible when they arrive. If you order them in bulk, they usually come packaged in wads of newspaper, and will eat the paper, ink and all.

Mealworms can be an excellent source of protein, calcium, and vitamins for a great many birds, including some that normally don’t visit feeders, but mealworms are only as healthful as the diet they are fed. They’re a serious pest in granaries, but are safe and easy to maintain in our houses, confined in buckets or plastic bins. Mealworms are larvae of a flightless insect called the darkling beetle. Woodpeckers, chickadees, and nuthatches will access it easily, but starlings cannot. To dissuade them, offer suet in a feeder that requires birds to feed hanging upside down. It may be prudent to keep suet cakes made with corn, cornmeal, or peanuts refrigerated until using. Because corn and peanuts can provide a growth medium for dangerous bacteria, it’s important for you to make your own suet cakes or to buy them from reputable dealers. Suet cakes are blocks made from suet or a thick substitute mixed with other ingredients, such as corn meal, peanuts, fruits, or even dried insects. When suet gets soft, it can coat belly feathers, a dangerous situation especially in spring and summer when birds are incubating-tiny pores on the birds’ eggs may get clogged, preventing the developing embryo from getting enough oxygen. When suet is melted and the impurities removed (“rendering”), it keeps much better, but can still get soft during warm weather. Raw suet grows rancid quickly when temperatures are above freezing don’t offer that except in winter. Animal fat is easily digested and metabolized by many birds it’s a high-energy food, especially valuable in cold weather. Wrens, creepers, kinglets, and even cardinals and some warblers occasionally visit suet feeders. Suet is particularly attractive to woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, jays, and starlings. Suet is technically defined as the hard fat around the kidneys and loins in beef and mutton, but in common usage, most kinds of beef fat are also called suet and can safely be fed to birds.