And a lots been happening! After another long unpremeditated break, Feathers and Forage will hopefully be getting back on track. Unfortunately things have been very busy over here, but although I can’t commit to regular weekly updates again yet, they should be more frequent again. I’m now back on my normal project at work, but as Tom and I are getting married in August, wedding planning, etc is taking up a fair amount of my time. We’ve also been looking after my parents dog for the last few weeks while they’re on holiday, but he’ll be going home as soon as the ash cloud goes away from above the UK and allows planes in again.
We recently had a minor case of illness with Lofty, who had too much yeast in her crop, but after a short course of treatment, she’s fully recovered again. We’ve recently started taking them outside with their aviator harnesses, which they seem to enjoy, although they don’t like walking on our mossy lawn at all, and always come running back up our legs or on to our shoulders. Outside, they don’t care about their harnesses and their distracted enough that they ignore them most of the time. Inside on the other hand, they rebel and fuss with their harnesses. The budgies have been fine, and noisy, with no change. They, unfortunately, can only come outside in a cage, as we can’t get harnesses small enough for them, and I don’t think they’d let us put a harness on them anyway, lol.
I’ll have a new foraging toy up today or later this week, as soon as the photos are online.
So yet again, the birds have run out of mash, and I decided to try out some new ingredients this time. The amount of mash I made was crazy, so here’s the recipe, with all the amounts reduced in half, lol.
100g Split Green Lentils
100g Mung Beans
100g Chickpeas
80g Buckwheat
75g Bulgar Wheat
50ml Quinoa
100g Barley
100g Sweetcorn
A selection of dried herbs and spices – I used what I had in the cupboard, which was crushed chillis, cinnamon, mixed herbs, basil, thyme and dill.
Firstly, the chickpeas and mung beans need to be soaked overnight, and soaking the lentils will reduce their cooking time too, so I soaked mine at the same time. As I can quite work out how to cook all the ingredients together, what with the differences in cooking time, I cooked mine separately, using three pans, then mixed it all together in a bowl. Check the back of the packets for cooking time, but everything is really just cooking until it’s soft, so the time isn’t too important. I started by cooking the chickpeas (these took an hour and a half, so they were the first to start and the last to finish), the lentils, and the mung beans. The lentils were the first to finish, so I drained them, rinsed them in cold water, and used the pan again to cook the quinoa. Put the quinoa in with 100ml of water, boil for ten minutes and simmer for fifteen minutes. The bulgar wheat just needs to sit in a bowl of water until tender – about 3/4 of a pint for 75g. Once the mung beans were done, I drained and rinsed them then added them to my bowl, and used the pan for the buckwheat – like the quinoa, rinse and put into 80ml of water, boil for ten minutes, then simmer until the water is mostly absorbed. The barley (I used pearl barley) again needs to go into cold water, boil for ten minutes, then simmer until soft. The sweetcorn, I used frozen and cooked in the microwave. As everything finishes cooking, drain, rinse and add to the mixing bowl. Mix everything up together, cover and put in the fridge overnight. I find leaving it in the fridge overnight allows it to soak up any water and become less mushy and our birds definitely prefered it more that way, than they did when I offered them some before putting it in the fridge. Now add in the herbs and spices.
One bowl like this (I made two bowls worth) fills four ice cube trays, which will last about a month for our six. You can always add more veg to the mix too. I just used what I happened to have on hand at the time. And you can mix up the mash with seed or pellets for reluctant birds.
Firstly, apologies to everyone for the lack of new posts in the last month. It’s been the combination of a temporary move to a different project at work (where I normally write my posts), a complete lack of imagination on my part, and a weeks holiday. However, we’re back on track now with a new foraging toy now, and another idea or two bubbling away at the back of my mind, and since we’ve practically run out of birdie mash, I’ll be making up a new recipe for that at the weekend.
If you missed the last post, Feathers and Forage is now a year old! Last month was a record breaking month for us with the most traffic to the site so far. We had a total of 633 unique visitors with 150 of you returning at least once, and 2,143 pageloads altogether. As I’ve seen a few of you coming here from Facebook, I’ve set up a Feathers and Forage FB group. Please feel free to join, discuss foraging, toys and recipes, make suggestions to me, and post photos and videos of your own birds foraging.
And now for the main feature – Foraging Toy No. 49. I used a skewer
as the basis for this toy, mainly for convenience, since they’re so easy to use, but you can also use leather or wire. I cut up one of our dried corn cobs into about inch thick chunks. Our two absolutely love pulling the corn from the cobs, so I thought they’d love them as part of a toy. They are pretty tough to cut through, but I managed ok with my little hacksaw, or you could try using a breadknife. It’s very easy to make holes through the soft core once you’ve got it chopped. To add a little more challenge, I wrapped the corn cob in newspaper, then threaded it onto the skewer.
Next is a cat ball, with the bottom removed, as described in previous posts. This I threaded on with the large hole at the bottom, and makes filling the ball much easier. Above this, I finished it off with another corn cob wrapped in newspaper, a block with three muffin cups upside down over it, and four long pieces of shredders. The last step was to fill the cat ball. The little cage is great for holding all sorts of things, like pieces of millet, pumpkin seeds and dried fruit. In this case, I used small peices of nutriberries.
Here’s another origami foraging toy for you. This one is made of three “dishes” stacked on top of each other. The dishes themselves are easy to make, and are made up of three identical units. I found that the best size to make these units from is a square from an A6 piece of paper (quarter of A4). The easiest way to do it is make a square from an A4 piece of paper and divide it by four. You’ll need nine of these squares to make three dishes, but you could make even more and have a taller tower if your birds really enjoy this toy.
I’ve made my own pdf instructions for the Triangular Dish and tested it on Tom, who managed to make it with no help from me, so they should be understandable! If you have any questions
about the instructions, please post a comment on this post and I’ll do my best to answer them. Normal printer paper should be stiff enough to hold its shape easily, and I haven’t had any problems getting the dish to stay together, but if you are worried about it, use water and flour to form a glue to secure the paper together.
Next I cut some triangles out of a cardboard plate. Three of these triangles should fit nicely into the bottom of the dish, and the fourth should be a bit bigger so it can cover the top dish nicely. Now it’s best if there’s already a small hole at the bottom of your dish. If there’s not, you can either resize your folds a bit to form a hole, or you can just make a hole with a pen. Make another hole in the cardboard triangle too. This triangle will give the dish some stability. I chose to use leather to hang the dishes on. Knot the bottom and thread on the first dish. Put whatever you want inside, then thread on the next one and repeat with as many dishes as you want. Finish off with the triangle lid you cut out, and tie a loop at the top. If your bird doesn’t get the hang of this toy, make holes around the side of the dish to give them somewhere to start ripping into the paper.
Now that the holidays are over, things will return to normal, and I should be posting once or twice a week again. Happy new year!
This is an easy recipe to cook for your birds. Now that Beak Appetite have closed down, I wanted to make something similar for our birds, since they enjoy it so much. This is the first recipe I’ve tried, but they really enjoyed it, and it doesn’t take long to make.
Ingredients:
250g of Country Style Soup Mix (mine contained Adzuki beans, barley flakes, pearl barley, red split lentils, green and yellow split peas and marrowfat peas – try to get one with no salt or preservatives. Most won’t have any as these ingredients can be dried easily)
200g of Frozen Veg Mix (peas, sweetcorn, baby carrots and green beans were in ours)
50ml of Quinoa
50g of Buckwheat
Herbs/Spices
The soup mix needs to be soaked overnight as it’s dried, then rinsed and
cooked until soft. Cook the frozen veg, quinoa and buckwheat. I cooked everything separately then through them together in a mixing bowl. We rinsed off the soup mix again before adding it to the rest, which cooled it all down. To finish off, I sprinkled in some herbs – thyme, basil, sage – cinnamon, and some crushed chillies. Mix it all up together and it’s done. We freeze ours in ice cube trays and defrost it when we need it.
This makes quite a lot of food. We probably have enough for our 6 birds for about three or four weeks with this recipe. You can also add in other things before serving, like seeds or pellets, especially for birds you’re introducing this new food to. All the ingredients are human quality, and Tom tried it and tells me its actually pretty good for human consumption too.
Apologies to all those who missed having a new post last week. I do have a new foraging toy in the works and it’ll be up later this week! As it gets closer to Christmas, things are getting busy, but normal service will be resumed soon! We also upgraded to a newer version of WordPress last week, for some reason, during the upgrade, some pages now have random symbols (like ’), in place of apostrophes and dashes. If you see any around the site, please let me know!
This toy is easy to make, and has gone down really well. I made three of these last week, one for our budgies, and one each for the budgies of my Secret Santa on Tailfeathers. On the bottom is a heart shaped bead made from polished stone. The one in the photo is Gold Sandstone. Stone beads make great (safe) weights for the bottom of toys, and the gold sandstone even sparkles in the light. After tying the bead on at the bottom, I alternated beads with blocks of balsa, lolly sticks and strips of shredders. This toy is going down really well with our birds, the balsa wood is all gone, and the rest is looking well chewed already. They’ve recently decided they love lolly sticks, so hopefully this will satisfy them for a little while longer.
This one is another that uses wire (cut from a kitchen whisk and straightened out). The bead at the bottom nicely covers the loop down there so the birds can’t get scratched on it. Next is a bull rush ball, from the “Woodlands” collection at Pets at Home. Above this are some pieces of cut up paper, then a twist ball. Next is two shredders, two lolly sticks, and two more shredders. It’s finished off with a vine ball, more paper, another bull rush ball, the left over paper, and some more beads. The beads at the top are all abe to fit over the loop there, which means I’ll be able to slide more over as the toy is destroyed, and keep the ends of the metal hidden. The quick link is attached to the wire loop at the top.
Now it’s getting towards winter, loads of shops are selling extra food and feeders for wild birds. This toy uses a feeder that
is designed to hold suet blocks. There are a couple of different designs for this. The one I have the front and top open away from the back and sides, while other versions just the top opens. It’s really simple just to fill it with paper and treats, and let them find things on their own. I made up some paper “sweets” some of which are just filled with newspaper, others have newspaper and sunflower seeds inside. The cast majority of these are only plastic coated, not powder coated, so if yours is plastic coated, only let your birds play with it under supervision. Wild birds tend not to chew on things, so plastic is fine for them. Parrots though could decide to chew the plastic off. Ours is hung on the playgym, where I can keep an eye on them playing with it.
This is a variation on the Treat Cup I posted a couple of weeks ago. The craft
shop was selling 4cm terracotta flower pots for 39p. If you go with terracotta, only use ones that aren’t glazed, as the glazes contain lead. Terracotta is porous, so don’t use it for any wet or moist foods, as they can be absorbed into it and grow mould. Always dry them thoroughly after washing. They’re pretty much the perfect size to hang and hold a nutriberry, and the plastic disks I have perfectly fit on the top of pots. These are really simple, just a piece of leather with a knot in one end, a mini flower pot, plastic disk and a loop at the top of the leather. Here’s a video of Lofty when I gave it to her. At around 0.14, she flips the “lid” up to hold the flower pot open, so she can pull out the millet, then holds it in her foot to eat it.
I’ve been wanting to get one of these for the birds for ages, but the retail price on them is £23 and I’ve always had other things I wanted to buy with the money. Finally however, I got hold of the materials to buy them. The total cost was 3 metal rings for 75p each, and a ball of jute rope for £3.50, which I used less than half of. I planned to take a lot progress shots as I made this, but I forgot, so there’s only two photos of it in progress. Hopefully they’ll be enough for you to get the idea though!
I got three metal rings from the craft shop. Unfortunately, the woman didn’t know what sort of metal they were made of. However, I’m confident that our birds have no chance of getting to the metal now it’s finished, so I’m happy this toy is safe for my birds. I positioned the three rings overlapping to get the orbiter shape. Using a small piece of thread, I bound the rings together at all the joins.
At this point, it’s really helpful to have a second person to help hold things in place. I cut a piece of jute roughly two of
my arm spans in length. Leave a tail of at least ten centimeters, then wrap the jute around the first ring tightly. Wrapping the jute takes two hands, so get your helper to hold the rings and the other end of the jute tightly in place. Beware of the rings sliding against each other. The thread should help to keep them in place. Whenever you get to a place where two rings meet, cross the jute across either the front or back of the join. Once you get all the way round, ensure both ends of the jute are tight, then tie them together over the outside of the join. Repeat this on the other two rings. If you meet a join where two rings meet and you previously went across the back, this time go across the front, and visa versa.
After wrapping round once we got Kami to test it, but the rope wasn’t quite wide
enough for her to perch oncomfortably, and I wasn’t sure how whether she would be able to chew through to the metal easily or not. We decided to go for an extra layer. This time I needed three arm spans of jute to go all the way around. Repeat as before. It should be a bit easier this time, as the rings will all be locked in place. You should end with it fully wrapped and with a knot on each join.
For our birds the orbiter is going to be an out of cage toy, probably on their new playgym. I’ll be easily able to monitor how much they chew on the jute,
and be able to replace it before they get anywhere near being able to chew through to the metal rings inside. For this reason I’m taking a calculated risk. I’m also leaving longish lengths of jute from each knot, so that I can attach toys to it at a later date. As they’ll only be on the orbiter under supervisation, it’s another calculated risk. Akio and Widget already love this toy/perch, and Misfit and Gizmo were coaxed onto it with millet last night.
