Fighting Cabin Fever: It’s for the Birds

January 12th, 2009 by AmyL · 7 Comments

string of popcorn and cranberries The snow is already piling up around here, which means that my boys are inside more than they’re out. It’s rather early in the year for me to be saying this, but oh my goodness they need some outlet for their energy! I send them out to run around daily, but that doesn’t last long, so one of my new pursuits in life is to find projects to keep hands and minds busy around here.

For my first attempt, I decided to string popcorn and cranberries for the birds. The older boys both told me that was a tedious job and too much work and boring and yada yada so on. Then I got out the popcorn popper, set it on the counter, handed them some brown paper grocery bags and told them to pop some corn.

Heh, heh, heh. They had a ball with it. Turns out if you set the bag on the floor the popcorn will fall right in with only minor spillage. You do get more popcorn on the floor if you hold the bag up closer and in your excitement shove your brother’s bag out of alignment, but that’s all I have to say about that. I wound up having each boy make his own batch of popcorn then dumped it all into one bag for stringing.

Later that evening I got out needle and thread and began. TechnoBoy got a bowl of popcorn so I set him up to join me. We had a good time and it went rather quickly. The Mercenary broke down and got involved after a while and added some popcorn. Oh wait, I don’t think I was supposed to tell you that. Might ruin his image and all.

The boys took the strands of popcorn and berries outside to hang on a tree the next day. So far, we’ve had no visitors, but I’m hopeful that the birds will notice soon. The strings are hanging from the tree and moving quite a bit in the breeze, so it’s possible we’ll need to find a way to make them more still. All that motion might be a little frightening for our feathered friends.

We have some branches in the garage that were used as walking sticks. I’m considering winding the popcorn and berries around a branch and then leaning it against the tree. What do you think? Will that work?

We still have more popcorn left in the bag, so there will be more evenings of stringing treats for birds this week. That gives me time to think of something else to occupy them…

by AmyL

Photo graciously provided by Amyl

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7 responses so far ↓

Beat the Winter Blahs: Make Bird Treats - Earnest Parenting // Jan 12, 2009 at 9:50 pm

[...] We decided to try and make treats for birds. You can see our first attempt at treats over at GNMParents, in my weekly post. That worked well, but we needed to do more! Keep busy! Very [...]
Serena // Jan 13, 2009 at 7:54 am

I broke out some beads and pipe cleaners and had my 3.5 yr old making “necklaces” – that was a good indoor activity!
Jennifer D // Jan 13, 2009 at 10:32 am

I like this idea, I just may try it. Do you have a porch you can maybe string it around? We have bird feeders out already that are very busy, so I’m sure they would be a big hit too. The birds have had it rough this year…
Anita B // Jan 13, 2009 at 12:52 pm

We don’t have a porch, but maybe we can string some on the trees outside-although we don’t have birds, we have squirrels. Popcorn okay for them?
Jennifer D // Jan 13, 2009 at 2:45 pm

I did a little search on what squirrels eat, and it seems they will eat just about anything. Their favorites are nuts and sunflower seeds, but anything that’s available, they will find. I’ve not found anywhere that says what NOT to feed them.
AmyL // Jan 25, 2009 at 7:43 pm

Serena, that’s a great idea! Pipe cleaners are very popular around here as well.

Jennifer D, we just hung the popcorn and cranberry strings on the tree. I wound up going out just this weekend and taking them down relatively untouched. Instead I found a big wooden stake and wound the strings around it and then leaned it against the tree so the birds could sit on it and eat. The strings were blowing so much in the wind that I don’t think a bird could have gotten to them. With the severe cold we haven’t even seen any birds for a couple of weeks, but they did show up Friday for the first time. I didn’t watch for any activity today, but we’ll check tomorrow.

Anita, squirrels love anything, lol. Dried corn on the cob is great. You can stick a nice big nail through a board and then stab the corncob on the nail so it’s standing upright. Hard to make sense of that in comments! If you need I can try and find a pic.
Anita B // Jan 25, 2009 at 8:59 pm

Thanks, I think I’ve got the picture!