Making Bird Cakes

This autumn craft activity for toddlers and children was inspired by the story The Squirrels who Squabbled written by Rachel Bright and illustrated by Jim Field. The beautiful story is based in Autumn and is the tale of two very different squirrels, Cyril and Bruce who both want the last pine cone of the season. It teaches us an important message about sharing with our friends and also teaches us about how our local wildlife will struggle to find food in the winter months. Since reading this story my toddler has become very concerned when he sees a bird or squirrel and asks me if they are “looking for food.”

For this Autumn activity I used lard, mixed bird seeds, peanuts, raisins, left over sweetcorn and porridge oats. I used old yogurt pots to help form the bird cakes when the mix was ready. I pierced the bottom of the yoghurt pots and threaded string through so that once ready the bird cakes could be hung up on a tree outside. I used our beautiful wooden woodland animals to give more context to the activity, my trusty black tray and shower curtain to contain the potential mess.

As with all our book based activities we read the story first. Immediately my toodler wanted to feed each of the woodland animals all the different foods that I had put out. They all got to try a little bit of each of the components of the bird cake. I modelled what we needed to do by putting handfuls off the different foods in the big bowl filled with lard. However my son wanted to do things differently…

He wanted to create his bird cakes in his own bowl.

Once all the ingredients were mixed we carefully added the mixture into the yogurt pots, making sure that the string poked out at the top. Once filled we put them in the freezer to set before hanging them outside on the trees in the garden. We then waited ad watch to see what wildlife would could spot trying our cakes.

This was a lovely autumn craft activity for my toddler but would work really well with older children.