Vacation Bird Feeder

I feel so ashamed. I have been home for two months now and I have yet to post any new photos of the birds. Today, that will change. This is the first entry in the new "bird photos" category. Aren't you excited?

Also in this post, you can see our nifty recycled bird feeding products that allowed us to go away for a week to ride our bikes around Kyushu. The ideas are pretty basic, not anywhere near major feats of engineering, but I post them anyway in the hopes that it might, just maybe, be the small spark needed to keep someone from going out and buying a fancy new away bird feeder when they most likely have everything needed right there in their own home, perhaps even waiting to be sent to a landfill or incinerator.

The main idea of course it to make sure the birds have enough food to last the week. Now, the birds are good at only eating what they need, so if we were to simply place a big bowl of seeds in the cage they would not eat them all in one day. The problem however, is that the empty shells of the seeds they eat on the first day would cover up the rest of the week's seeds. Unfortunately, despite the well-documented intelligence of some birds, our birds are too dumb to look under the empty shells to find the rest of the seeds.

To solve this, we tried a few things.

The recycled PET bottle bird feeder with a ramen spoon.

This is incredibly complex, so pay close attention.

Step 1. Poke a little hole in the side of a PET bottle large enough for seeds to come out, but small enough that they don't just pour out at once.

Step 2. Put a ramen spoon, or some other trough shaped object into the hole. Angle it down so that the seeds fall down into it. It is important not to angle it up, as we have discovered that the seeds do not readily travel upwards, rather, have a tendency to fall downwards.

The seeds might gat a little sopped up in the hole, but this is fine. Once the birds discover where the seeds are coming from, they will readily pick at it unplugging any stoppages.

The good thing about this, is that the trough is small enough that the empty shells do not all fall back into it, covering up the fresh seeds. Since we were going to be gone for a week, we made sure the spoon was elevated a bit so that the empty shells falling around it would not get too deep.

This little invention worked well. When we got home the birds had eaten all the seeds possible.

The hunter-gather foraging seed sack

This was intended to give them both something to keep themselves busy for the week, as well as emergency reserves of food. Assuming they are not so hungry that they have lost all their strength, they should be strong enough to chew their way through a clear plastic bag to get at the seeds they see inside. (The love doing this when they are out of the cage and happen to see the feed sack laying around unguarded)

To make sure that they don't just chew a single hole allowing all the food to pour out at once (which would then lead to the same problem as if we had just put a dish with the food in there from the start), we decided to make layers so that they can chew through one layer, have fun with the food, and then if they get hungry later, they can chew through another layer.

The reason we call it the "hunter-gather foraging seed sack" is that we hang them in various places around the cage that normally don't have food. They have told us that they enjoy the feeling of foraging for food as their wild ancestors once did. For added fun, some of them should be hung so that they are just within reach, but not too easy.

In actuality, they didn't even touch these while we were gone. In fact, judging from the unusually large pile of crap under their perch, it appears that they spent most of the time sitting in one place -something that rarely happens when we are home.

The recycled PET bottle bird water feeder.

The big problem with water is that it gets all scummy after a day or two, so just leaving a big dish of water would not be much help. We used a PET bottle, again taking advantage of those crazy laws of physics.

Simply poke a hole in the bottom of the bottle at the level you want to the water to be at. Fill the bottle with water, screw on the cap, and you have a water dispenser that makes sure the water is always at the same level.

We made the water level very low to make sure that the ratio of scummy standing water to clean water from the bottle was not too high. Unfortunately, the water still becomes scummy, especially at the top, so even if the water below is clean, the birds have to eat through the scum to get it.

I think next time we will experiment with one of the hamster water bottle style designs. The reason we didn't do it this time is that we weren't sure if they would know how to use it.

Fun-fun Toy Feeders

These are simply a collection of odds and ends that the birds like to chew on strung together with a needle and thread. We soaked some soy beans and chick peas over night making them soft enough to poke the needle through, then hung them in the sun to re-dry once they were threaded. Not only can the birds eat this, but they also can't resist chewing them -especially if it is dangling there tantalizingly from the top of the cage.

In addition to the beans, we also give them mikan (tangerine) peels. For your bird's sake though, think about where the mikan has come from and what kind of poison, pesticides, and waxes or silicone are in the skins. We, of course, only give them non-pesticide, non-wax peels -something that we would feel comfortable eating ourselves. They also like peanuts which are both fun and food. Just breaking into the peanut shell is at least a thirty minute project for Awii.

Finally, on the rare occasion that we have corn on the cob, there is always some left over bits of corn kernel that we just can't get out of cob, so we dry it in the sun and hang it in their cage. While this is not one of their favorite toys, we have seen them picking out the leftover kernels on occasion.