For the Birds?

 
image: a rather dark picture of seed cakes fresh from the oven...

The muffins I put out yesterday afternoon were gone by this morning. Did the birds eat them? Maybe.  Or maybe the squirrels, rabbits, or opossums did. I'm not entirely fussy, so I'm going to call this a win. Besides, they were insanely fun to make and used up some ancient bacon grease that was jammed into the darkest recesses of my refrigerator that was god only knows how old.

I will admit, too, that I went off recipe almost immediately because I freely substituted anything I thought was vaguely similar to the requirements. The basic recipe that I riffed off goes like this:


Mockingbird Muffins

1 cup cornmeal 
1 cup flour
1 cup bread crumbs
1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 cup currents
1/2 cup bacon drippings
(1/4 tsp sand -- highly optional, this is for the bird's gizzard, and if you chose to use it, I suggest something like aquarium sand or other fine sand.)
1 cup water

Combine cornmeal, flour, grated bread crumbs and soda in a medium-sized bowl. Add currents (and sand, if using.) Pour in bacon drippings, water, and mix well. Spoon into muffin tins. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Serve on feeder tray or impale on branches.

----
After basically approximating this recipe, I ended up trying a second set using oat bran instead of cornmeal and they worked fine. After that, I figured I could just throw into the mix any number of different types of things and see what I got.... since it literally only matters that the concoction mostly hold together (though even if it doesn't, it just ends up as bird granola instead of a bird muffin, so yay?)  I added finch food--so small seeds like thistle, millet, etc. I subbed some ancient gummed up dried cranberries that I found on the back of the pantry shelf, tossed in wheat berries and nut meats that were languishing in a jar... so, I mean, I feel like these could easily be a "I need to clean out my pantry of stuff that is generally the kind of food birds will eat, let's see if we have takers" kind of project for a rainy day. 

I had also found in the basement an old suet feeder that Shawn had constructed years ago, and I thought, okay, let's make some basic suet. I found a recipe in Cosgrove's book and then improvised again.  Here's the resulting suet cake:


Image: A moderately appetizing-looking hunk of suet cake.

Suet, here, being metaphorical, however. I am not interested in buying beef suet for the birds, so I dug around around in my pantry and discovered a fairly rock hard jar of organic peanut butter and then used the remaining bacon grease and an extra dollop of shortening to soften everything up. As you kind sort of see in the picture, I also had some freeze-dried strawberries from a packet that I think we opened some time three years ago and some similarly ancient dried apple slices. If I remember right, I tossed some sunflower hearts (that was bird food that I'd already had), bread crumbs, and some corn meal. I stuck it in the fridge overnight and tah-dah!  

I have no idea if the birds will like any of this, but I will say that it smelled weirdly tasty to my human nose.

Shawn came down in the afternoon and excitedly said, "OH! MUFFINS!" and had one half way to her mouth before she noticed the thistle seeds and gave me the stink eye and said, "These are the bird muffins!" And, I had to reply, "Yeah, sorry, honey."

We did end up with a weird amount of wildlife in our yard yesterday. We had a rabbit who decided to lay around in our front yard, several of the usual squirrel friends, and tons and tons of house sparrows. So, maybe this worked?  I will say that if you are feeling frugal it is an interesting idea to kind of extend your bird seed supply. I made several muffins worth using only a cup of bird seed. I probably normally dump seven cups on the ground, nearly every day.