Suet
(This column was first published in the November 25, 2002 issue of The Buffalo News.)
Like
Jack Sprat's wife, birds love fat.
And
a ready supply of fat can be very useful to them, especially in winter when
simply staying alive can prove difficult.
This
was brought home to me in striking fashion once when I was banding birds. I
weighed a captured song sparrow one afternoon just before the onset of a
blizzard. Then 40 hours later I trapped the same sparrow. In that brief period
it had lost a quarter of its weight.
Think
about that. An equivalent weight loss for a 160-pound human would be 40 pounds.
That might seem like an attractive way to diet but it would surely kill you in
the process. It's like losing the weight of a leg in less than two
days.
Some
studies have also shown that birds have to consume from 50 to 100 percent of
their body weight each day. For one carefully observed chickadee this meant
capturing and consuming one average-sized insect every 2.5 seconds.
Bird
watchers can take advantage of these facts to attract birds by putting out suet
for them.
The
rewards can be great. Species attracted to suet in this area include: downy,
hairy, red-bellied and pileated woodpeckers, flickers, chickadees,
white-breasted and red-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmice, blue jays,
golden-crowned and ruby-crowned kinglets, brown creepers, and of course the
omnipresent starlings. Still rarer birds like thrashers, towhees, thrushes and
warblers occasionally visit suet feeders or for tidbits dropped to the ground
under them.
Now,
while those birds await your catering, let's get down to suet basics.
Suet
is animal fat, specifically the fat surrounding the kidneys of cows and sheep.
(Deer too -- hunters take note as birds are especially attracted to deer suet.)
It is pure and hard and has a waxy appearance. From 15 to 20 pounds can be
taken from a single animal.
Years
ago butchers were happy to give suet to anyone who asked but today most fat is
removed from carcasses at meat packing plants and very little arrives in retail
stores. Happily, with birders asking for it, some butchers again provide suet
-- however, quite reasonably, for a price.
Once
you have suet, you can simply hang it out in an onion bag. Most birders prefer,
however, to purchase suet feeders. These are hardware-cloth containers with the
metal plastic coated so that birds will not injure their bills. I am told that
those with roofs seem less attractive to starlings.*
My
neighbor Ann Fourtner informs me that squirrels are not attracted to pure suet,
but that they are to any suet product that has other ingredients added. I
understand that rendered suet still enjoys this attractive feature.
To
render suet, simply melt it under low heat. To avoid smelling up your house,
consider doing this in an electric frying pan in your garage. Once it is
melted, you can remove the stringy parts. Then when it is cooled, you can cut
it into blocks for feeding. Refrigerate extra blocks in freezer bags.
Alternatively, partially cooled suet can be stuffed into crevices in suet logs
or pine cones.
Unfortunately,
it often takes birds some time to find pure suet. For that reason, many birders
stir in other ingredients in various proportions during the rendering process:
chunky peanut butter, lard, no-shell birdseed, sugar, cornmeal, flour, raisins
or dried cranberries, and even crushed eggshells or sand to help birds digest
their food.
Finally,
Mike Galas offers a great suggestion: cut a 1.5 inch hole in a coconut, replace
the liquid -- "drink it, it tastes good" -- with a suet mix and hang
the coconut out as your feeder.-- Gerry
Rising
__________________
* As we now have only one
local store specifically catering to birders, I encourage everyone to utilize
it. It is Wild Birds
Unlimited at 3835 McKinley Parkway in Blasdell. Owner Marilyn
Peccoraro-O'Connell, her husband Tom O'Connell and Marty Junkin, one of
her regular helpers, all serve as excellent resources on all aspects of
birding. Marilyn has provided much information for this
column.
For more information about bird feeding and in particular many recipes, I refer you to the following websites: