Vegetarian Bird Suet Recipe
There are many species of birds that especially like suet: woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches are a few that come to mind.The suet cakes you purchase in the supermarket are made with animal fat as a base. If you’re a vegetarian like me, you may have looked for vegetarian suet, only to be disappointed.
I usually make a half-recipe.
1 cup crunchy peanut butter
1 cup shortening
2 cups quick cook oats
2 cups cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1. Melt the peanut butter and shortening over low heat (they melt very quickly).
2. Add remaining ingredients (I do this while still on the heat)
3.Spoon into molds (I saved the square plastic molds that the store-bought suet comes in, but you can be creative with just about anything. A half-recipe makes enough to fill two molds from store-bought suet.)
4. You can either let it cook at room temperature or put them in the refrigerator.
Squirrel Be Gone II
You’ll find a review of the Squirrel Be Gone squirrel-proof bird feeder on this website, which wasn’t very favorable. However, the Squirrel Be Gone II is nothing like it.
This feeder looks very much like the Absolute squirrel-proof bird feeder. It too has a trap door that closes off access to the bird seed which is activated by the squirrels weight.
This feeder has a removable roof for easy cleaning, and has the capacity for a whopping 12 pounds of seeds, and can either be pole-mounted or hung.
The all-metal design means that it can’t be chewed through by frustrated squirrels. You can get it in either green with a copper roof or red with a steel roof (which resembles a classic red barn).
Here’s where you can find it online: Yardiac
Fortress Triple Tube Feeder
The Fortress Triple Tube squirrel-proof bird feeder looks mighty impressive to the eye. It is another variation of the tube feeder inside a metal cage. The difference between this and other feeders is that there are three tubes which make up the feeder. You can fill one it with three different kinds of seeds to attract different types of birds.
It is very similar to the Opus Top Flight feeder. However, they have made one improvement over the Top Flight feeder: the lid locks in place. This prevents the squirrel from removing the lid to get to the seed. (And speaking from experience, this is exactly what happens with bird feeder that don’t have locking lids).
All-in-all, it is a pretty good squirrel-proof bird feeder.
Firstly, all tube feeders tend to have a problem with inclement weather. The seeds at the bottom of the tube tend to get wet from the moisture that gets in at the seed port. This causes the bottom layer of seeds to clump, preventing the dry seeds above them to fall down.
Secondly, this feeder has a seed dish under the tube to catch fallen seeds, the same as the Opus Top Flight. All the squirrel has to do is hang upsidedown on the cage and eat seeds out of the dish (which, believe me, he’ll do).
So, this type of feeder tends to not be 100% squirrel-proof. Still, the metal cage is chew-proof, and it does fairly well.
Here’s where you can find it online: Yardiac
If you are specifically looking for a triple-tube feeder, you might also want to consider the Opus Copper triple-tube bird feeder. It has the extra feature of a built-in squirrel baffle, so it is impossible for the squirrel to hang upside down to eat from the tray.
