I was very excited to welcome the first day of spring, which arrived this past week! Unfortunately, I had a problem. This whole week has been super windy, and one of my feeders, which I’ve had for probably ten years, was knocked down and the base literally broke off, leaving a hazardous broken edge. Obviously, I didn’t want to just hope my birds wouldn’t cut their feet on it, so I took the nearest feeder material – a plastic limeade bottle – and set out to make a replacement that would attract every bird in the neighborhood. Here’s what I did!
I had never made this type of feeder before, and there were no ‘how-to’ videos about making one out of a limeade bottle on the internet, so I decided to take inspiration from the classic bottle-and-spoon feeder, and wing it from there. I don’t have any experience with power tools, so I got some help with cutting four holes on each side. Two sides were for bigger birds, with a perch farther below the seed openings, and the other two were for small ones, with perches closer to the holes. I also had the narrow top cut off, to make filling it easier.
The next step was to make the perches. I was going to use wooden spoons like the traditional spoon-and-bottle version, but it turned out they didn’t fit the holes, so I used un-sharpened pencils instead. They actually fit pretty well! That one used the spoon shape to catch any seeds that fell from the holes, but since mine didn’t use spoons, I couldn’t do that, so I attempted putting something there to do that instead. That didn’t work, and as I was using large sunflower seeds and my feeding ports were pretty small, I decided it would be fine without.
Now it was time for the final touches! I strung a cord through two of the seed openings to hang it from, and then to spruce it up, decorated it with some ribbon bows.
And there you have it! I’m pretty proud of it, though it looks a little scrappy due to my relative inexperience with making feeders like this. I don’t have any photos of it hanging, but I’ll provide those once I get some!