Is there a cheap and easy way to make bird feeder ';fat cakes'; for woodpeckers?

you don't even need a recipe! Just follow a few guidelines:





Western bluebirds, chickadees, jays, towhees, warblers, woodpeckers and more will come to your yard for suet treats in all seasons, but I suggest limiting homemade suet treats to winter use. It's far too easy for the stuff to melt or go rancid in warmer months.





Making homemade suet cakes is simply a matter of melting fat down to a pour-easy consistency, adding a few ingredients of your choosing, then pouring the mixture into a mold. The shape of the mold is determined by the type of suet feeder you'll use.





If you are using lard or shortening for homemade suet cakes, adding equal parts of peanut butter flour will help maintain correct consistency of regular suet cakes.





To this warm and pour-able mixture you could add rolled oats, bird seed, cornmeal, raisins, unsalted nuts and anything else you think the birds would enjoy. Then, pour your warm suet 'soup' into the mold (a bread pan where you could slice off bits for your store bought suet feeder, cupcake tins that you could pierce with wire and hang from a tree, etc.) Specialty recipes are at the bottom of this page.





Keep any unused portions in the freezer for up to two months.Is there a cheap and easy way to make bird feeder ';fat cakes'; for woodpeckers?
I save the fat from cooking hamburger and bacon in separate containers, and keep the fats in my fridge until I'm ready to use them. The birds (and sometimes the neighbor's dogs) get the hamburger fat. I use the bacon fat to cook people food in...it's too good to give to the birds! My cardiologist doesn't approve of this, but she's a spoilsport. I fry potatoes in bacon fat, and use it to grill cheese sandwiches in, and other things.





Back to the hamburger fat. I melt it, and then add some (cheap, generic) peanut butter while it's still warm. I have a pine tree in my back yard, and so I have plenty of free pine cones. They aren't the prettiest cones I've ever seen, but they're free. I let the fat and peanut butter mix cool down, and I take a table knife and smear the mix in the spaces between the ';petals'; of the pine cones. The birds don't seem to care if it's the cheap generic peanut butter, they're very glad to get the extra fat in their diet. I buy the generic peanut butter for the birds, and I buy a better quality for people use. I originally bought the generic for people use, but I found that our family doesn't like it.





With my method, you only have to buy the peanut butter, everything else is something that is either a by-product of cooking, or something that I gather from my yard.





If you don't have access to free pine cones, you can pour the peanut butter and fat mix into small shallow cans, like tuna cans, and let it cool. Even though birds' beaks are quite hard, please make sure that the can edges where they've been opened are completely smooth.





I put these fat sources out during the winter, but also during the spring, when I'm sowing grass seed. If I'm sowing seed, then I might add some seed to the cakes, to try to get the birds to eat the stuff I put out for them instead of the seed that I want to grow.Is there a cheap and easy way to make bird feeder ';fat cakes'; for woodpeckers?
You just melt the lard, add raisins, seeds, chopped peanuts, rolled oats etc. Then we pour them into clean bean tins to set then turn them out when cold and put on the bird table. You can also re-use half coconuts if you have any which had been bought commercially filled with fatball mixture.