How to make a bird feeder on a personal plot with your own hands
Today, in the conditions of lack of time and a rich assortment of any products, you can go the way of the least resistance and buy a ready-made bird feeder, however it is much more pleasant to turn on your imagination a bit and build an original bird feeder with your own hands from a variety of improvised materials, making the whole family interested in such an activity.
Content
- Homemade feeding trough. General design features
- We make the simplest bird feeders. Plastic bottle feeders video
- Feeders from cardboard boxes. How to do it right?
- Wooden bird feeder. Manufacturing sequence video
Homemade feeding trough. General design features
Any bird feeder, regardless of its design, is a covered area on which there is a place for several birds and for the feeder itself, where it is necessary to fill the feed. Its design can be either suspended or provided for installation on a flat surface, but regardless of this and from the materials used to make the home-made structure, any feeder should be equipped with:
1. Roofs protecting feed from a large amount of precipitation;
2. A sufficiently wide hole, providing free penetration of birds within the structure;
3. The manufacture of a bird feeder should be made of a material characterized by high resistance to temperature and humidity changes, which will ensure the long service life of a home-made feeder.
There are quite a few options for making beautiful bird feeders, but many prefer to use the most common and most budgetary way to create a hanging dining room - from plastic bottles.
We make the simplest bird feeders. Plastic bottle feeders
Almost any plastic container with a volume of 1 to 5 liters is suitable for making bird feeders from a bottle. The process of creating such a feeder begins with cutting two openings located opposite each other in the bottle.
The size of the holes is not so important, but it is necessary to comply with a certain requirement, according to which between the holes two jumpers must be 1.5 cm wide. The shape of the hole also depends on your taste preferences and can be either rectangular, round or arched. So that the edges of the holes are not so sharp, they must be glued with adhesive tape or electrical tape.
To make life easier for birds and make their stay in the trough as convenient as possible, two holes can be made in the lower part of the tank and a straight bar or twig can be inserted, which will serve as a convenient perch. You can fix such a feeder on the tree by wrapping it around one of the jumpers to the trunk of the tree or making a through hole in the lid through which a cord is stretched, which serves as the fastening of the feeder to the tree.
Next will be considered another original method of manufacturing a feeder from a plastic bottle using spoons. To do this, in a plastic bottle, you need to make two through holes located perpendicular to each other and insert wooden spoons into them. Then, the hole near the scoop needs to be slightly expanded, which makes it easier for birds to access the feed poured in the bottle. The feeder to the top is filled with food and suspended by the holes made in the lid.
Feeders from cardboard boxes. How to do it right?
Also popular are bird feeders from boxes, for the manufacture of which you will need, just a cardboard box made from juice or milk. In the upper part of the cardboard packaging, it is necessary to cut a through hole, which serves to thread the fasteners, the role of which can be handled by a fishing line or a denser twine of at least 30-40 cm in length.
Further, on both sides of the cardboard packaging, using scissors or a knife, it is necessary to cut two wide openings that serve for the entry of birds. The holes should be located opposite each other. The finished product can be placed both on a tree and in any convenient place near the house, which will allow you to freely observe the life of birds. On average, it takes no more than 15 minutes to make such an elementary feeder.
Bright and pleasing to the eye will be feeding troughs made of candy boxes. To create them, you need a cord, fixed on a branch, and a box of chocolates, which simply hangs on this cord like a roof. At the same time, we strengthen the sheet of cardboard between the halves of the roof, which acts as a pallet.
Garden bird feeders not only benefit from a practical point of view, but also often become the original decoration of your garden. Such products include wooden bird feeders, which are considered traditional and the most thorough. The manufacture of such solid feeders, which can easily serve several seasons, is carried out in several stages, and it is necessary to approach the creation of bird feeders for birds with due care, starting from the design stage of the bird canteen.
Wooden bird feeder. Manufacturing sequence
If you plan to get along with making a simple feeder from a plastic bottle or cardboard box, then, as it became clear from the previous descriptions, special schemes for this will not be required. However, if you decide to thoroughly get down to business and design a wooden dining room, you need to stock up on paper, a ruler and a pencil, which you can use to create a drawing of a feeding trough.
To get started, you should put an approximate drawing of what you want to make on paper. At the same time, you can easily determine the approximate dimensions of the finished house by eye, having previously processed them mentally. The typical sizes of the feeders are 25 x 25 cm, however, making a dining room for larger birds, the sizes can be increased. It is desirable that the design of the feeder provides for the sides on the pallet, as well as the roof, which will ensure the availability and, at the same time, the safety of the feed.
Thus, the finished drawing should include:
1. A pallet equipped with bumpers, the height of which is at least 2 cm;
2. A roof, which may be flat, made of plywood sheet, or gable;
3. Side supports in the amount of 2-4 pieces, depending on their width, 25-30 cm high.
If you are confident in your abilities and are an experienced home master who is not able to make a mistake in making such a mundane design, you can skip the step of creating a drawing on paper and make it directly on plywood or wood that you prepared to create the product. To make the feeder as light as possible, for its manufacture we recommend using a wooden board for the base, a thin bar for making racks and plywood, which will be required for designing the roof.
The standard design of the feeder, which does not require the use of expensive decorative wood, implies the dimensions of the finished product 40x30x30, where the numbers are length, height and width, respectively. To proceed to the creation of the structure, mark out two identical sheets of material that are necessary for the manufacture of the pallet and roof, and also prepare four racks that serve to secure the roof to the base.
So, if you transferred the drawing to the material to be cut or made it immediately on it, cut out all the details, while, as mentioned earlier, the pallet is made of a wooden board, the roof is made of plywood, and the racks are made of thin timber.
Remember that, according to the drawing, the pallet and roof are characterized by dimensions of 40 x 30 cm. To make the roof sloping, which is necessary so that moisture is removed in a timely manner from the roof of the feeder, we cut two racks 30 cm high, and another two 25 cm that are fixed in pairs according to each other. Then fix all the parts with moisture resistant glue. Side supports can be fixed with screws.
Ready-made dining room for birds can be installed on any plane, whether it is the corner of the veranda or the old stump in the garden. If you want to hang the feeder, then take care of creating special suspensions, which can be played by a strong twine.
