Backyard Recipes

If you're in the mood for cooking but want more slenderizing faire, Nancy Castillo's recent post on the Zen Bird Feeder, Decorate a tree for your birds, will give you some easy inspiration for both feeding the birds and decorating.

Her recipees for bird suet and variations for how to attach it to a tree, make me eager to get started. And the timing couldn't be better. Berries and seeds are fast disappearing and the official date of winter hasn't even arrived. After this red-bellied woodpecker's visit to the dogwood last week, I noticed by afternoon all the berries in that tree were gone.

For more experimenting, here are a few more sites with scratch suet recipes and ideas for serving your dining guests: The Baltimore Bird Club's full page of suet recipes; The Nutty Birdwatcher's page of suet facts, feeders & recipes and Scialis' page on Suet Recipes. And don't miss trying the popular Zick Dough found at Julie Zicklefoose's nature blog.

Now which one to try first! But here's another question. My first experience with suet feeding resulted in the whole block mysteriously disappearing overnight. So the bigger, nagging question is how do I outsmart the racoons? If you have any success stories, I would love to hear them.