Terry Suchma
04-29-2006, 09:29 AM
Getting the Word Out;
The Problems with Bird Feeding
By Eirik A. T. Blom
September/October ’99 Birdwatcher’s Digest, pp.88-99
With special permission from the generous folks at Birdwatcher’s Digest and Eric Blom.
Listening to the latest round of howling and yammering infecting the Internet and at bird club meetings is like being playground director at a school with 300 kids and two swings. "He pushed me!”
"Did not! "
"Did too! "
"Not not not not not!"
"Too too too too! "Cootie-head!"
It is the sort of intellectually vigorous, high-minded, thought- provoking discussion that makes me want to yell-Time out!” and make everyone sit in the comer for five minutes.
Except this shoving match is not about anything as trivial as swings or presidential politics or global warming. This is a weighty matter, as consequential as outlawing the designated hitter, the best place to get coffee at 4:00 a.m., and which field guide to use.
This is about bird feeding---everything from throwing a few seeds on the deck to lovingly constructed and managed feeding stations that remind me of those appalling food courts in mega-malls where the burritos taste just like the frappuccino. Except that birds love feeding stations.
The surprise is not that the bird-watching community is having a pinch-and-kick over bird feeding, but that it has taken so long for the verbal hair-pulling to start. After all, there are millions of people who feed birds. (Just how many millions is an unsettled but important question we will get to shortly.) birdfeeding has become very big business. It affects billions of birds. It may have taken a while for serious controversy to emerge, but it is here, and it is serious. Deadly serious. A lot of birds are dying because of it.
Time out! Back to your seats!
The lack of reasoned discussion is predictable, but it is getting in the way. Someone mentions birds dying at feeders or cites a study showing bird feeders can be a nexus for the transmission of disease. The counter charges fly: this is just more anti-bird-feeding pap and character assassination to boot. The conversation has become a shoving match. It is happening with depressing frequency. If you haven't heard it yet, you will, and you can bet your yard list that it is going to appear in a news- paper near you before long.
The reason the squabbling is so fierce is that feeding is the most personal and emotionally important relation- ship we have with birds. Hawk watching, listing, banding, Christmas Bird Counts, and all our other activities combined do not bring us as close to birds as feeding does. All our other activities involve looking at or studying birds in some manner, an us-and-then relationship. Feeding birds crosses the barrier. They become invited guests, friends. We talk about the birds at our feeders as "ours," a conceit we rarely extend to birds seen elsewhere. And it happens in our yard, our castle, the last place left where every individual is still lord and ruler.
When someone suggests, even inadvertently, that we are less than perfect hosts, we become immediately aggrieved. We might tolerate a subtly raised eyebrow over our choice of cars, political parties, or even significant others, but question our behavior and authority as king of all we survey (or the surveyor has allotted us) and you have crossed the line.
We need to get past our instinctive emotional reaction because this is a serious subject. To get the debate off of the playground and into a nice warm den with a fireplace and hot cocoa all around, let's stipulate several important facts.
1. A huge number of people feed birds-a passenger-pigeon-sized flock of people.
2. People do it because they like it. It is an important cultural phenomenon that provides participants with a deeply satisfying sense of connection with nature and makes us feel good about ourselves.
3. It is big business and getting bigger fast.
4. Feeding benefits some species. We can argue endlessly about whether some of the species benefited are deserving, or precisely what the benefits are in some cases, but it does benefit some species, including ones we approve of.
5. The popularity of bird feeding has had an important effect on many birds, on bird distribution, and on bird populations. It has gone largely unremarked and unstudied, and we are just making the first tentative investigations. The subject is so complicated and rich that it requires a separate treatment just to lay out the issues. As important as it is, however, it is a side issue here.
6. Birds get sick and die at feeders, and the incidence is growing almost as rapidly as bird feeding itself.
7. Everyone reading this is a bird- feeding saint.
How many people are feeding birds? It is not possible to get precise figures. There are surveys and studies and extrapolations from the sale of seed. Most estimates fall between 20 and 40 million. The difference, despite being 20 million, is not relevant. Whichever it is, the number is vast, and, far more important, it's vastly larger than the number of people who know what they are doing. For the sake of discussion, we'll settle on 30 million, but it's easy to take the high end or low end and run the numbers. It won't change anything.
"Vastly larger than the number of people who know what they are doing" is an emotionally charged phrase, which is why I included number 7 above: Everyone reading this is a bird-feeding saint.
How many people are included in number 7? Include in it all the readers of Bird Watcher's Digest and all other national bird magazines. Include members of bird clubs. Include the members of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and participants in their projects, such as FeederWatch. Include even all those folks signed on Internet discussion groups about birds. Include, in fact, everyone who is somehow connected, who belongs, joins in, reads about, or is even peripherally socially active in the bird- watching community. Then double the number. The most generous figure you can come up with is one million-a million people who have ready access to information, who regularly come across information about feeding birds, who know what the issues are and what is involved.
That's 30 to 1. For every knowledgeable, conscientious feeder, there are 30 who, with the best of intentions and with good and caring hearts, are feeding birds without knowing anything about it other than that it makes them feel good. They are blissfully unaware that they may be killing birds-that many of them are killing birds.
Try this sometime: set aside three hours one winter morning and walk slowly through a suburban or exurban neighborhood, peering, discreetly, into people's yards. You will be amazed by the number of bird feeders you find. You will also be depressed by the hap-hazard state many of them are in and by the number that are empty. Go back a few days later. Many of the ones that were full are now empty, and many of the ones that were empty are now full. Remember, none of these people belongs to the local bird club. They have no source of information about bird feeding other than the marginal instructions that came with the feeder, which mostly cover installation.
Or, wait until the meteorologist has promised the first snow of the year, even if it is only a dusting, and go down to your local market and set up in front of the birdseed stand and watch the stuff flow out of the door into the cart, an act of generosity triggered by a barely felt memory of being told somewhere, by someone, that birds need help in bad weather. What's the point, other than the evidence that we are more generous and caring than you would suspect from reading the front page of the paper? That brings us to number 6: Bird feeding is killing birds.
Bird feeding may have been killing birds for a long time, but we have become aware of it in the past five years. The outbreaks of disease, salmonella and trichomoniasis and others, have become news, reaching even the popular press on occasion. The news is not news to the active birdwatching community. There are websites on the Internet that track the spread of disease. Bird club newsletters run regular stories. Despite the dissemination of information, you probably are only partly aware of what has happened.
Most people know about large numbers of house finches dying at feeders throughout the Northeast, and that smaller numbers of birds like American goldfinches and purple finches and pine siskins have been affected. But there have also been significant outbreaks in the Midwest, in the Maritime Provinces, in the Pacific Northwest, and in Colorado. Doves are dying in Texas and Arizona, and so are the hawks that feed on them. Red- polls in Alaska. Quail in the Southwest.
These are no longer isolated or anecdotal events, and new instances are cropping up weekly. If you took a large map of North America and started putting colored pins in at each site where an outbreak of disease, it would quickly become a colorful map indeed, and you would need to put in an order for more pins with a depressing regularity.
What can we do? /we are spreading the word: all those stories in the newsletters, all that information on the Internet. This is old news.
We are preaching to the converted. Remember, we are all bird-feeding saints. We clean our feeders, whisk away the hulls, disinfect with bleach, change the hummingbird nectar every few days. We are not the problem.
We are also not contributing to the solution. We aren't getting the word to the people who need it most, the 30 to our one. They don't know there is a problem and that they are contributing to it. If we are serious about birds, we need to find a way to reach them.
It is going to be difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating. Not impossible but no snap. It is also critically important, and we have an inarguable obligation to try. I believe it is possible, and offer the following, preliminary steps that should be taken. Remember, though, this is about education, not blame. Not one of those 30 million people wants to hurt birds. There is not a disciple of Satan among them.
1. We need to be far more aggressive in persuading our local papers to run stories about responsible bird feeding, especially in the wintertime, when so many folks are participating. The stories have to include information about the problems associated with feeding, but they should focus on the benefits and on how easy it is to avoid the problems.
2. Every bird club should have a person (which means volunteer) whose job it is to monitor the situation locally and continent-wide. This person will be a source for information and the one who answers the questions from the public and the media.
3. Every bird club should produce a simple flyer about bird feeding. [Please see the editor's note at the end of this article.] It should explain the problems that can arise and detail, in clear and simple terms, the precautions that everyone who feeds birds can and should take. This cannot be a scare sheet. It has to promote and encourage bird feeding. It is only by encouraging and praising people that you can get their support and cooperation.
4. Every member of every bird club in the country should carry one or two of the flyers every time he or she goes out into the field. A half-a- hundred times a year I am stopped by strangers who notice that I am watching birds, and they often ask questions and express their interest. They very frequently have questions about birds in their yards and feeding. We should never pass up the opportunity to give them the information. A flyer has several advantages over just telling them. For one thing, they have the information written down and can refer to it later. They will forget much of what you say to them. For another, it won't sound as if you are criticizing them, which only defeats the purpose.
5. Every local store that sells bird- seed and bird feeders should be encouraged to provide a copy of the flyer to every customer. If necessary, let the local club cover the cost of printing. It's only pennies when done in bulk. The person who is responsible for monitoring birdfeeding issues can make certain that the retail outlets have copies and that there is always a sufficient stock. (Yep, more work for volunteers.)
6. The flyers should be available at public libraries and other information centers- A copy should get into the hands of every teacher.
7. Every library and many organizations and civic groups offer special events for their members and patrons. So do businesses like garden centers. Local bird clubs should work with those groups to present a program every fall about bird feeding, a free class or seminar or workshop or gathering. It is the Perfect opportunity to spread the word and hand out the flyers. It is also a perfect opportunity to attract members.
We can reach a great many people this way, but we also need to take at step on a national level. A coalition of bird organizations needs to be formed to produce a flyer that can be included inside every bag of seed sold anywhere on the continent or printed on the Outside of the bag. The seed companies have to be actively involved, but the push has to come from bird groups. The expense is minimal, and the potential benefits tremendous.
Oh my, You sigh. Another national campaign, another chicken-little, the- sky-is-falling proclamation. Spare me,
Spare me. Is all this really necessary?
It is. We all grow weary at times of being asked to save the world either with our checkbooks or our time. our mailboxes have become a Pandora's Box of end-of-the-world pronouncements and Promises. We try, but we
are catastrophe-whipped, desensitized by the clamor. I am not immune: I throw away a lot of the stuff unread. I understand.
But I believe it is absolutely necessary to address the issue of bird feeding, and I think there are three reasons that compel us.
First, the problem is real and it is getting worse. Unchecked, it may s much worse. Millions of birds are get going to die, and we can do something about it.
Second, it is a public relations disaster waiting to happen. There are still plenty of people who do not like birds and do not like People who feed them. There are annual efforts to pass local Ordinances restricting feeding, and so many People have tried to invoke the law to stop their neighbors from feeding birds that it is no longer news. Anti-environmentalists and anti-bird people are always looking for weapons to use. They will eventually use the undeniable fact that birds are dying at feeders, to whip up support for their positions. The secondary effect is that a lot of well-meaning people will stop feeding birds because they haven't heard the other side of the story.
The third reason is the most important. We are watchers and lovers of birds. We treasure them and we accrue great pleasure and satisfaction from them- We owe it to the birds.
EIRIK A.T. BLOM is a Birdwather’s Digest (BWD) contributing editor. Eirik also writes and edits BWD’s publication, The Skimmer.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Birdwatcher’s Digest has produced a free, one-page flyer, “The Dos and Don’ts of Birdfeeding. A master copy is available at http://www.birdwatchersdigest.com
Or by sending a #10 SASE to: Feeding Flyer, P.O. Box 110, Marietta, OH 45750.
We encourage all birders to make and distribute copies of this important and helpful i
The Problems with Bird Feeding
By Eirik A. T. Blom
September/October ’99 Birdwatcher’s Digest, pp.88-99
With special permission from the generous folks at Birdwatcher’s Digest and Eric Blom.
Listening to the latest round of howling and yammering infecting the Internet and at bird club meetings is like being playground director at a school with 300 kids and two swings. "He pushed me!”
"Did not! "
"Did too! "
"Not not not not not!"
"Too too too too! "Cootie-head!"
It is the sort of intellectually vigorous, high-minded, thought- provoking discussion that makes me want to yell-Time out!” and make everyone sit in the comer for five minutes.
Except this shoving match is not about anything as trivial as swings or presidential politics or global warming. This is a weighty matter, as consequential as outlawing the designated hitter, the best place to get coffee at 4:00 a.m., and which field guide to use.
This is about bird feeding---everything from throwing a few seeds on the deck to lovingly constructed and managed feeding stations that remind me of those appalling food courts in mega-malls where the burritos taste just like the frappuccino. Except that birds love feeding stations.
The surprise is not that the bird-watching community is having a pinch-and-kick over bird feeding, but that it has taken so long for the verbal hair-pulling to start. After all, there are millions of people who feed birds. (Just how many millions is an unsettled but important question we will get to shortly.) birdfeeding has become very big business. It affects billions of birds. It may have taken a while for serious controversy to emerge, but it is here, and it is serious. Deadly serious. A lot of birds are dying because of it.
Time out! Back to your seats!
The lack of reasoned discussion is predictable, but it is getting in the way. Someone mentions birds dying at feeders or cites a study showing bird feeders can be a nexus for the transmission of disease. The counter charges fly: this is just more anti-bird-feeding pap and character assassination to boot. The conversation has become a shoving match. It is happening with depressing frequency. If you haven't heard it yet, you will, and you can bet your yard list that it is going to appear in a news- paper near you before long.
The reason the squabbling is so fierce is that feeding is the most personal and emotionally important relation- ship we have with birds. Hawk watching, listing, banding, Christmas Bird Counts, and all our other activities combined do not bring us as close to birds as feeding does. All our other activities involve looking at or studying birds in some manner, an us-and-then relationship. Feeding birds crosses the barrier. They become invited guests, friends. We talk about the birds at our feeders as "ours," a conceit we rarely extend to birds seen elsewhere. And it happens in our yard, our castle, the last place left where every individual is still lord and ruler.
When someone suggests, even inadvertently, that we are less than perfect hosts, we become immediately aggrieved. We might tolerate a subtly raised eyebrow over our choice of cars, political parties, or even significant others, but question our behavior and authority as king of all we survey (or the surveyor has allotted us) and you have crossed the line.
We need to get past our instinctive emotional reaction because this is a serious subject. To get the debate off of the playground and into a nice warm den with a fireplace and hot cocoa all around, let's stipulate several important facts.
1. A huge number of people feed birds-a passenger-pigeon-sized flock of people.
2. People do it because they like it. It is an important cultural phenomenon that provides participants with a deeply satisfying sense of connection with nature and makes us feel good about ourselves.
3. It is big business and getting bigger fast.
4. Feeding benefits some species. We can argue endlessly about whether some of the species benefited are deserving, or precisely what the benefits are in some cases, but it does benefit some species, including ones we approve of.
5. The popularity of bird feeding has had an important effect on many birds, on bird distribution, and on bird populations. It has gone largely unremarked and unstudied, and we are just making the first tentative investigations. The subject is so complicated and rich that it requires a separate treatment just to lay out the issues. As important as it is, however, it is a side issue here.
6. Birds get sick and die at feeders, and the incidence is growing almost as rapidly as bird feeding itself.
7. Everyone reading this is a bird- feeding saint.
How many people are feeding birds? It is not possible to get precise figures. There are surveys and studies and extrapolations from the sale of seed. Most estimates fall between 20 and 40 million. The difference, despite being 20 million, is not relevant. Whichever it is, the number is vast, and, far more important, it's vastly larger than the number of people who know what they are doing. For the sake of discussion, we'll settle on 30 million, but it's easy to take the high end or low end and run the numbers. It won't change anything.
"Vastly larger than the number of people who know what they are doing" is an emotionally charged phrase, which is why I included number 7 above: Everyone reading this is a bird-feeding saint.
How many people are included in number 7? Include in it all the readers of Bird Watcher's Digest and all other national bird magazines. Include members of bird clubs. Include the members of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and participants in their projects, such as FeederWatch. Include even all those folks signed on Internet discussion groups about birds. Include, in fact, everyone who is somehow connected, who belongs, joins in, reads about, or is even peripherally socially active in the bird- watching community. Then double the number. The most generous figure you can come up with is one million-a million people who have ready access to information, who regularly come across information about feeding birds, who know what the issues are and what is involved.
That's 30 to 1. For every knowledgeable, conscientious feeder, there are 30 who, with the best of intentions and with good and caring hearts, are feeding birds without knowing anything about it other than that it makes them feel good. They are blissfully unaware that they may be killing birds-that many of them are killing birds.
Try this sometime: set aside three hours one winter morning and walk slowly through a suburban or exurban neighborhood, peering, discreetly, into people's yards. You will be amazed by the number of bird feeders you find. You will also be depressed by the hap-hazard state many of them are in and by the number that are empty. Go back a few days later. Many of the ones that were full are now empty, and many of the ones that were empty are now full. Remember, none of these people belongs to the local bird club. They have no source of information about bird feeding other than the marginal instructions that came with the feeder, which mostly cover installation.
Or, wait until the meteorologist has promised the first snow of the year, even if it is only a dusting, and go down to your local market and set up in front of the birdseed stand and watch the stuff flow out of the door into the cart, an act of generosity triggered by a barely felt memory of being told somewhere, by someone, that birds need help in bad weather. What's the point, other than the evidence that we are more generous and caring than you would suspect from reading the front page of the paper? That brings us to number 6: Bird feeding is killing birds.
Bird feeding may have been killing birds for a long time, but we have become aware of it in the past five years. The outbreaks of disease, salmonella and trichomoniasis and others, have become news, reaching even the popular press on occasion. The news is not news to the active birdwatching community. There are websites on the Internet that track the spread of disease. Bird club newsletters run regular stories. Despite the dissemination of information, you probably are only partly aware of what has happened.
Most people know about large numbers of house finches dying at feeders throughout the Northeast, and that smaller numbers of birds like American goldfinches and purple finches and pine siskins have been affected. But there have also been significant outbreaks in the Midwest, in the Maritime Provinces, in the Pacific Northwest, and in Colorado. Doves are dying in Texas and Arizona, and so are the hawks that feed on them. Red- polls in Alaska. Quail in the Southwest.
These are no longer isolated or anecdotal events, and new instances are cropping up weekly. If you took a large map of North America and started putting colored pins in at each site where an outbreak of disease, it would quickly become a colorful map indeed, and you would need to put in an order for more pins with a depressing regularity.
What can we do? /we are spreading the word: all those stories in the newsletters, all that information on the Internet. This is old news.
We are preaching to the converted. Remember, we are all bird-feeding saints. We clean our feeders, whisk away the hulls, disinfect with bleach, change the hummingbird nectar every few days. We are not the problem.
We are also not contributing to the solution. We aren't getting the word to the people who need it most, the 30 to our one. They don't know there is a problem and that they are contributing to it. If we are serious about birds, we need to find a way to reach them.
It is going to be difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating. Not impossible but no snap. It is also critically important, and we have an inarguable obligation to try. I believe it is possible, and offer the following, preliminary steps that should be taken. Remember, though, this is about education, not blame. Not one of those 30 million people wants to hurt birds. There is not a disciple of Satan among them.
1. We need to be far more aggressive in persuading our local papers to run stories about responsible bird feeding, especially in the wintertime, when so many folks are participating. The stories have to include information about the problems associated with feeding, but they should focus on the benefits and on how easy it is to avoid the problems.
2. Every bird club should have a person (which means volunteer) whose job it is to monitor the situation locally and continent-wide. This person will be a source for information and the one who answers the questions from the public and the media.
3. Every bird club should produce a simple flyer about bird feeding. [Please see the editor's note at the end of this article.] It should explain the problems that can arise and detail, in clear and simple terms, the precautions that everyone who feeds birds can and should take. This cannot be a scare sheet. It has to promote and encourage bird feeding. It is only by encouraging and praising people that you can get their support and cooperation.
4. Every member of every bird club in the country should carry one or two of the flyers every time he or she goes out into the field. A half-a- hundred times a year I am stopped by strangers who notice that I am watching birds, and they often ask questions and express their interest. They very frequently have questions about birds in their yards and feeding. We should never pass up the opportunity to give them the information. A flyer has several advantages over just telling them. For one thing, they have the information written down and can refer to it later. They will forget much of what you say to them. For another, it won't sound as if you are criticizing them, which only defeats the purpose.
5. Every local store that sells bird- seed and bird feeders should be encouraged to provide a copy of the flyer to every customer. If necessary, let the local club cover the cost of printing. It's only pennies when done in bulk. The person who is responsible for monitoring birdfeeding issues can make certain that the retail outlets have copies and that there is always a sufficient stock. (Yep, more work for volunteers.)
6. The flyers should be available at public libraries and other information centers- A copy should get into the hands of every teacher.
7. Every library and many organizations and civic groups offer special events for their members and patrons. So do businesses like garden centers. Local bird clubs should work with those groups to present a program every fall about bird feeding, a free class or seminar or workshop or gathering. It is the Perfect opportunity to spread the word and hand out the flyers. It is also a perfect opportunity to attract members.
We can reach a great many people this way, but we also need to take at step on a national level. A coalition of bird organizations needs to be formed to produce a flyer that can be included inside every bag of seed sold anywhere on the continent or printed on the Outside of the bag. The seed companies have to be actively involved, but the push has to come from bird groups. The expense is minimal, and the potential benefits tremendous.
Oh my, You sigh. Another national campaign, another chicken-little, the- sky-is-falling proclamation. Spare me,
Spare me. Is all this really necessary?
It is. We all grow weary at times of being asked to save the world either with our checkbooks or our time. our mailboxes have become a Pandora's Box of end-of-the-world pronouncements and Promises. We try, but we
are catastrophe-whipped, desensitized by the clamor. I am not immune: I throw away a lot of the stuff unread. I understand.
But I believe it is absolutely necessary to address the issue of bird feeding, and I think there are three reasons that compel us.
First, the problem is real and it is getting worse. Unchecked, it may s much worse. Millions of birds are get going to die, and we can do something about it.
Second, it is a public relations disaster waiting to happen. There are still plenty of people who do not like birds and do not like People who feed them. There are annual efforts to pass local Ordinances restricting feeding, and so many People have tried to invoke the law to stop their neighbors from feeding birds that it is no longer news. Anti-environmentalists and anti-bird people are always looking for weapons to use. They will eventually use the undeniable fact that birds are dying at feeders, to whip up support for their positions. The secondary effect is that a lot of well-meaning people will stop feeding birds because they haven't heard the other side of the story.
The third reason is the most important. We are watchers and lovers of birds. We treasure them and we accrue great pleasure and satisfaction from them- We owe it to the birds.
EIRIK A.T. BLOM is a Birdwather’s Digest (BWD) contributing editor. Eirik also writes and edits BWD’s publication, The Skimmer.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Birdwatcher’s Digest has produced a free, one-page flyer, “The Dos and Don’ts of Birdfeeding. A master copy is available at http://www.birdwatchersdigest.com
Or by sending a #10 SASE to: Feeding Flyer, P.O. Box 110, Marietta, OH 45750.
We encourage all birders to make and distribute copies of this important and helpful i