How to Make Suet Treats for the Birds

This post was originally published on DIY Network’s blog Made + Remade in January 2014.

I spent hours upon hours over the holidays admiring a beautiful bird feeder setup concocted by my clever and nature-loving, bird-watching parents. The biggest of the feeders sits outside of their kitchen window and attracts everything from bluebirds to woodpeckers to a family of cardinals, all poised and chomping on seeds just inches from your face, creating a truly amazing and educational scene. May we all be lucky enough to experience this!

I’m on a mission to make our home welcoming in the same way, with beautiful, effective feeders to make our property feel a little more like a nature preserve, so when I learned you could make your own suet treats for feeders, I set out to try it for myself. I’m still on the hunt for the perfect feeder, but the “ornaments” I created to adorn the trees outside our dining room windows were easy to make and proved to be a real lure for the wildlife during this cold, blustery month.

To make the ornaments a little more interesting than your store-bought suet or rectangular forms that fit in feeders, I used cookie cutters to shape the seed mixture, pulling an assortment of stars (and trees, and snowflakes) from our own collection of cutters. Before the mixture dried, I used a pointed object to make a hole in the shape to make room for stringing a piece of rope.

The mixture dried in the cookie cutter forms overnight and then slid free. After tying a piece of ripe to each ornament, they were ready to hang on the trees outside the window. A sweet suet sight!