By Veronica Dantzler

Animals adapt and change their behavior based on the season. This is often most easy to observe in the birds flying right outside your window! To aid this seasonal observation of birds, we suggest creating a citrus bird feeder to attract them to visit your home (and to help them with a plentiful source of food!).

Materials

• Cutting board
• Oranges – one orange makes 2 feeders
• Knife
• Yarn
• Skewer – worked best for me but a toothpick would work, anything sharp enough to penetrate the orange
• Bird seed
• Helpful material: a wet towel – this one gets a little sticky! Cut orange in ½ right down the middle horizontally (so that you are cutting in the middle of the top and bottom). The halves will act as bowls for the seed.

Instructions

1. Take out the orange segments and enjoy a delicious snack. I used a knife to carve/loosen the slices and then had my eldest scoop out the insides with a spoon. This part gets a little messy.
2. Using the skewer punch 4 holes in the peel of the orange bowl. Its best to evenly space your holes.
3. Weave yarn through holes in orange. We pressed the yarn through the skewer, as if it were a needle and pushed the skewer through the hole.  It helped when we would twist the skewer.  Once we got the yarn through the hole we would use our fingers to pull it through.  Weaving through each hole.
4. Pull yarn so that you can knot the two ends together.
5. Once tied pull the two sides even so that you can evenly hang your orange bowl.
6. Fill with bird seeds. Its best to fill outside or near where you plan to hang your feeder.  We dropped one of our feeders on the way outside and bird seed went everywhere!! Eeeeks!!!
7. Make sure to place feeder somewhere you can observe the birds eating their treat.  It’s so exciting to catch them in the act!

It may take a day or two for the birds to discover your feeder but once they do, you should have a bevy of birds visiting every day.  You may also catch some squirrels trying to make a meal of your bird seed. This can lead to a great discussion on squirrels and why they must store their food for the winter. It’s so exciting for kids to see the birds eating from their creation!