Make a bird feeder

Spring is coming, I have to help our school girl doing some silly bird watching in our garden, and learned how to make a simple bird feeder from recycled milk cartoon or plastic bottle.

Most of instructions are similar with one stressing this point, the other emphasizing that. Like the one below, the first step is to make it such that birds can perch:

• Punch a hole on either side of an empty plastic bottle towards the bottom.
• push a twig all the way through with an end sticking out on both sides for perches.
• Poke more holes above the perches so birds can peck the seeds out.
• Fill the bottle with sunflower seed or mixed seeds.
• Tie a string around the neck of the bottle and hang it from a tree.

But if you make a bird feeder according this instruction from BBC (broken link, see below instead please), your birds have to peck out seeds while they are flapping wings and flying. because there's not twig sticking out from bottle for a bird to perch:

• you make a small hole through the top of the carton. This is where you will thread your string through to hang the feeder from a tree later.
• cut a square hole in the side of the carton. You need to make sure the hole is big enough for several birds to feed from it at once.
• Loop the string through the hole at the top. You can decorate your bird feeder with strips of coloured tape or sticky-backed plastic. Different birds are attracted to different colours.
• Fill up your carton with seeds. Black sunflowers seeds are particularly good for birds.

It is very interesting that you also can make a easy bird feeder from pine cone. You can make pine cone feeders by smoothing peanut butter with spoons onto the pine cones. Then roll the cone in birdseed, tie a string to the top end, and it is ready to hang outside.

Because we have many trees and in the garden, so we don't need a recycled Christmas tree for hanging the bird feeder.