Making a Bird Feeder with Kids—A Motherhood Photography Project

In my mind, Fall only is made of days where the temperature peaks at 68 degrees, the sky is a lovely shade of blue, and the trees look like they belong on the board of Candy Land.

Do you know what I forget? The days where it’s cold and rainy.  The days where Mother Nature is almost teasing, whispering in the wind, “Don’t get too comfortable, winter is coming.”

We had a week of this weather in early-October.  It was fine the first day, a fun conversation point even, but by the third day, we were all getting a little stir crazy.  We HAD to get outside…all of us.  I was getting borderline nuts and the kids were bouncing around like wild ping pong balls.  My patience left me days before.

We took the first break in the rain we could find to put rain boots and sweatshirts on to face the wet cold we had been hiding from.  Everything was too wet to play on and the kids were dragging their feet around our usual walking trail.  And then, I kicked a pinecone.  A simple little crunchy artifact of the season, laying on the ground. Naturally, my kick attracted the attention of my kids, and they quickly picked one up and started looking at it, peeling it apart, smelling the sweet smell of evergreen that dripped from it.

Then, in a flashback to a project from my childhood, I excitedly told them to pick up as many as they could carry.  20-minutes later with a few household items thrown across the kitchen table…we were making bird feeders I remembered from elementary school.  It was a mess, but  I was giddy.

Peanut butter covered fingers and spoons, birdseed that spilled on the floor, and cut pieces of twine covered our pinecones.  It was a simple project, nothing fancy or complicated, and one of the kids may or may not have eaten a handful of birdseed (#motherhood) but the kids had fun and we got our bird feeders hung on the tree before the next round of rain came.

The perfect project for a day that needed a project to help us regroup and find calm.  Even better, we had all of the materials lying around the house, no crazy train trip to the craft store required, which is always a practical and sanity saving win for this mama. 

Pine Cone Bird Feeders

Materials:

• pinecones
• twine/ribbon
• peanut butter
• birdseed

1. Tie pieces of twine on top of pinecone (be sure to do this FIRST or the pinecone will get harder to handle)
2. Put peanut butter on the pinecone to act as a glue.  Spread on with a spoon or roll cone around in a bowl of it.  My kids did better rolling it around.
3. Roll peanut butter covered pinecone around on birdseed (mine was on a paper plate)  to cover peanut butter.
4. Hang on your favorite tree and watch for birds!

{all photographs edited with Gypsy from the Bohemian Film Collection}