 Hi, I'm Claire Dyson and I am a gardener and an outdoor educator and I love getting outside having adventures and doing stuff that involves looking at nature and finding out more about it. So today what we're going to do is something special for the birds in this town. So where we live there's lots of houses and there's birds around but the birds don't have loads and loads of food at the moment because it's winter. So what we're going to do is make a bird café and one of the things we're going to make for the bird café is these lovely delicious fat balls and they're going to help the birds have lots of fat and protein for them to eat and then that will give them lots more energy and get them through the last bit of the winter before they start meeting other birds, making nests and hopefully laying some eggs. The more we feed the birds and the more we help them and help nature on its way then the more birds we're going to have in this little community and that's going to be great. Even though it's February and it's a bit cold and it's a bit wet at the moment you can still get out and hopefully you've been able to build a shelter that Ross showed you how to do the other day. So we've got our shelter up in the garden and we've also got a fire going. I wonder how you got on with lighting your fires yesterday and we've got this lovely little fire going. It's in a nice safe space and it's a bit smoky but that's okay and that's just keeping it nice and cosy out here and I've also got loads of layers so if I'm looking a bit poofy that's because I've got probably about six layers on under here and some nice big thick boots so that I can stay warm and enjoy being outside comfortably cos that's really important. So the types of birds we might get in the garden here would be robins, blackbirds, thrushes. Sometimes we see blue tits we saw some this morning and sparrows, great tits and those kind of birds so we're not going to see necessarily herons or eagles or kestrels or anything like that that you might see out in more wilder places but in a town those are the sorts of birds that we might see here. Okay this is really quick and easy to do and what you're going to need is some old pine cones. Now if you don't have any of these I'm going to tell you some other ways you can do this later but if you've got some pine cones that's great. They need to be nice and open so they need to be warm. Pine cones are a bit magic actually. If you leave them out in the cold they'll close up and go all tight a bit like you might if it was cold and if you put them in front of the fire or on a radiator then they'll kind of start to open up and all these parts of the pine cone is just open, fan open and then that's where we're going to put our bird feed. Okay so we need a pine cone and a piece of string and if you need any help you can just ask whoever you live with your mum or your dad or your guardian and then what we're going to do is tie this around here nice and tight so it won't fall off so just around the top of the pine cone and I'm going to do a double knot. It doesn't really matter what knot you use and then that hangs nice and firmly from that piece of string. Okay now we've done that part we're going to do this fun bit which is to I'm going to pour in all the different seeds. So what we've got here is all the ingredients we need for our fat balls which is peanuts and they're good quality peanuts. We've got this mixture here that I got from the shop and that is a mixture of sunflower hearts, millet, it's got oats in it and what else have we got? Some maize and some sunflower seeds so all sorts of different seeds that are in that mix and we're going to put both of these mixes in together. We're also going to put in some raisins so some nice juicy raisins and cheese as well so I need much more than that so we're going to put these in, mix these in and peanuts, just kind of equal measures really of all of these and this is grated cheese, birds love a bit of grated cheese and that's full of fat which they need to keep warm in the winter and then the raisins and we're going to mix that up. It's good to get your hands in there or if you want to and you don't want to get your hands dirty you can use a big spoon but I quite like to get my hands in there. So with these ingredients you can't go wrong but just make sure that the peanuts, they're not salted, the birds won't want the salt on the peanuts so just make sure they're plain peanuts and if you stick to some of the bird feeds in the shops they'll be great. As well as these ingredients that I've just shown you with the peanuts and all the small seeds, raisins and cheese you can add in a few other little ingredients so birds really like cooked rice but it's got to be cooked and maybe some small breadcrumbs so if you've got some leftover stale bread you can put some really tiny breadcrumbs in as well and another thing if you're feeling really brave is you can put in some mealworms and you can get those from the shops and they are dried real worms so if you're a bit squeamish you might not like it but if you don't mind I know the robins wouldn't mind and they love those so you can add those into your mix so here we go that's our mix so what we're going to bind it all together with we've got some lard so this is sold in the shops as well next to the margarine normally and it's just a bit of dripping or lard it's called so you can get some of that on your shop and we're going to chop it up and we need to melt it down so what we're going to do is chop it into really small chunks and luckily we've got a fire to melt it all on so I'm just going to put that into the pan all crumbled up and ready for melting over the fire right so I've put a special glove on this is a leather glove you don't want a plastic glove or if you don't have a leather glove you could use an oven glove it stops your hand getting burnt over the fire or touching anything hot so that's really good I'm just going to put that on there for a minute and let that start to warm up a bit okay that's just about done you don't want it too hot just melted and warm and definitely not too hot so I'm going to pour this all over the seeds lovely that's a whole block of lard gone in there the birds are going to love it okay take my glove off now and we're going to give that a really good stir just like baking a cake that's starting to look really good yeah that's going to be so happy right so we've got our pinecone with its string and then you're going to have to get your hands in there you might want to wear a pair of marigold gloves for this I don't know but if you don't mind getting a bit dirty you can just squidge it in there and then make sure you get a really good covering all the way over the pinecone okay so really squidging it in there what a lovely you're definitely going to wash your hands after this one so I'm going to start on another one squidging it in and just remember the birds don't mind if it doesn't look perfect they're going to eat it anyway because they're going to be really hungry winter is a really hard time for the birds and they have to keep warm and fed and they're getting ready to think about spring and all that that's going to bring for them with nest building so they need as much energy as they can get so I'm going to pop that on there if you've got mixture left over you can keep it in the fridge and then when these are emptied by the birds and you can just warm it back up again on the stove or on a fire or in a microwave and just warm it back up and then it will go soft again and then you'll be able to squid it back on so you can keep topping them up the really nice thing about using pinecones and garden string is there's no plastic involved so at the end when the birds have finished pecking off all the food it means you're left with a beautiful little pinecone hanging out of a tree or off a feeder so it still looks nice and also it's all stuff that will rot back into the ground eventually one day not like plastic which can't rot anywhere so we want to have as minimal impact as we can in feeding our birds so we're just going to use these pinecones so if you run out of pinecones or you haven't got any that's okay what you can do is just roll these into fatty balls and what we're going to do is just put those into the into the bowl there and then I'm going to put those in the fridge so that they go hard and what you could do is put them onto a bird table if you have one and feed the birds that way so that's a way of getting around not having any pinecones another way you can make these fat balls for the birds is to get some cases for cupcakes and put up a little bit of a hole through there and poke a bit of string through a bit of garden string or any string you have at home and tie a knot in it and then that string that's sitting in the cupcake case easy for me to say can sit there and you can pour the mix that you've made into the case and then put it into the fridge and these are some that I made earlier so we just got these out of the fridge and we're going to can take the case off there we go they can go on the fire and look at that lovely fat ball so we've got those and we've got the pinecone ones and we've got the loose ones that can sit on a bird table so loads of options of how to do this I think the birds are going to be very happy we have got loads of these bird fat balls so what we're going to do with them I think I might leave them on the doorstep to a few of my neighbours and see whether they'll put them up in their gardens and then the birds will be nicely spread out all around the community okay so let's get these hung up in the garden so I'm going to tie this up in this little tree here in our garden we've only got a tiny garden but we make the most of it I'm going to tie that onto the branch and it's nice and high and it's away from the wall or anything where cats can get to cats can be a real problem for birds and there's lots around so we need to just make sure that it's out the way of any predators and I've put them up next to some peanuts and some other just seeds on those feeders so there it is, our fat balls, I hope you enjoy making those too so now all you need to do is find a quiet spot, keep out the way, keep quiet and see what comes into the bird cafe to eat I like to keep a pen and paper handy so that I can write down what comes in and what different species are there and there's so many different species you might even want to get a book like this one so you can look all the birds up and find out more about them if you want to look a little closer at the birds you could get some binoculars and they help you see loads of detail on the birds and helps you identify them even more easily or if you haven't got a pair of binoculars you could always make your own these are some I made earlier speaking of finding out more you could join your local wildlife trust or the RSPB, they've got fantastic websites with loads of activities and ideas and that will help you learn even more about wildlife Upload your photos and you could be in with a chance of winning a far-raven goodie bag and at the end of the week one lucky family will win a whole family of rucksacks