Use leftover popcorn and fruit that’s past its best to make these easy bird feeders with your kids.
The term “polar vortex” is being tossed around again, it finally feels like winter has truly arrived. With temperatures well below zero, and a couple of feet of snow on the ground, it’s become very difficult for the local birds and squirrels to find food.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you know how much we LOVE making simple bird feeders to help our backyard birds during the winter months. We’ve made many over the years, using using whatever we have on hand: cereal, grains, fruit, nuts, corn kernels etc.
We don’t use anything fancy when we’re making our feeders – no tools, no special equipment… just common every day food items and materials that you can find around your house.
You may also like our fruit and Cheerio bird feeders.
To make our fruit and popcorn bird feeders we used:
- dried cranberries
- a few strawberries
- an apple
- popcorn
- florist wire
- raffia
Making a homemade bird feeder like this one is a great way to use up fruit that’s past its prime.
Because Valentine’s Day is coming up soon, I wanted to go with a red and white colour scheme for our feeder today.
Luckily, we had a few strawberries left in the fridge that were past their best, and an apple that was going soft, so they were perfect to for this project.
Making your fruit and popcorn bird feeder
To make your feeder, simply chop your fruit into bite-sized chunks.
You can toss the apple with a bit of lemon juice if they’re going to sit out for a while. This will keep them from going brown.
Thread your fruit and popcorn onto your florist wire, alternating between fruit and popcorn as you work.
The popcorn can be a bit tricky as it tends to break easily when you poke it with the wire, so I like to look for a little hole in the piece of popcorn to slide the wire through.
If there isn’t a hole, gently twist the wire through, as if you were drilling through the popcorn. T
his works much better than pushing it straight through which almost always results in the piece of popcorn flying apart.
While I was working on threading the fruit on to the wire, my little partner was working on a simple bird feeder of her own.
Once you have all your fruit and popcorn on the wire, you can bend it in the shape of a heart.
Twist the loose ends of your wire together, and pop one last piece of fruit onto the twisted ends.
Now take your beautiful fruit and popcorn bird feeder outside, and hang it from a branch in your backyard!
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Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
Liberty
Hi Jackie! It’s me Liberty. I was looking at the heart shaped bird feeders and as I was reading I noticed you said it’s finally starting to feel like winter. Well, we only got one snowfall here in the west and that was on Christmas. On Monday we didn’t need a coat or jacket to be outside!
happyhooligans
Lucky you! It is freezing here! We’ve had a couple of blizzards, and we did lots of shovelling this past weekend! I’m jealous of your balmy temperatures!
Kari
I was just thinking about purchasing a bird feeder but this sounds like a much better idea and a fun activity for the little ones. Thank you!