How to make a pine cone birdfeeder

Encourage hungry birds into your garden with this simple feeding station.

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Jo Price

Published: January 13, 2015 at 9:46 am

Feeling crafty and fancy treating your garden birds? Try making this pine cone bird feeder to hang up in the garden.

Head over to our wildlife gardening hub for more advice on how to attract wildlife into your garden, including caterpillar foodplants for butterflies, how to make a bee hotel and our garden bird nestbox guide.

Illustrations by Alan Batley

1

Tie a length of string around the top of an open pine cone (it should open when dry).

2

Using a knife, carefully smear the pine cone with a thick layer of specialised unsalted peanut butter, which is available from various retailers.

3

Put a birdseed mix into a bowl. Roll the pine cone around in it until it is coated in seeds.

4

Hang the cone from a tree or a shrub. You can also string several cones together.

More on garden birds:

Deputy editor, BBC Wildlife Magazine

Jo Price is the deputy editor of BBC Wildlife Magazine. She trained as a journalist at Cardiff University and has been a member of the BBC Wildlife team for nine years, working in various roles. Jo commissions exciting natural history content and interviews experts for the magazine’s Wild Times section and discoverwildlife.com. She enjoys wildlife gardening to support an array of species, including a few hedgehogs: creating a hedgehog highway has resulted in the prickly mammals visiting her suburban garden to forage and hibernate. Jo spends her weekends exploring local nature reserves, Magor Marsh and RSPB Newport Wetlands, and going on countryside walks and bike rides with her family.

Illustrations by Alan Batley

© Nature Picture Library/Getty