Bird Feeding: Helping or Harming?

We feed birds. We’ve been doing so for many years now—for various reasons, but I sometimes ponder whether our feeding them is for our benefit or theirs. We love to watch them buzz around the feeder; they are very entertaining. We like to feel that we are helping our feathered friends—especially during cold and snowy times. But are we really aiding them? Is it an act of anthropomorphizing to call them friends? Are we just making them dependent on us and thus less able to forage for themselves? How much do they need our food? We shudder when our cat catches one and wonder if we are just attracting them largely to serve as feline snacks.

These are not easy questions to answer. Numerous organizations and experts, with mixed results, have repeatedly considered them. Countless people feed birds and avian experts are chary about telling them that their efforts are not really helping. I’ve done some investigation and here are my current feelings. I stress the word “current,” because I believe that the jury is still out on the matter.

First the pros: As I said, we love to watch birds. They are beautiful and their antics provide unending fascination. In the process, we come to appreciate and understand them better. We mostly feed black oil sunflower seeds—a nutritious and energetic food. We add suet cakes and other kinds of nibbles, as the birds show their preferences. So we are giving them valuable nutrients that can help keep them healthy and better able to withstand cold winter nights and fend off disease. Studies have tended to show that feeding birds does not make them dependent—they’re still likely to go after other sources of wild food. Finally, when birds gather together around the feeder they can be safer than when alone, since more pairs of eyes are on the lookout for predators.

Now for the cons: The principle one for us is the cat. Although we want him to go after mice, he still catches half a dozen or so birds each year. I’ve rigged the feeder so that he can’t reach it and it’s out in the open, so he can’t hide behind something and ambush them. We severely scold him when he stalks the birds and keep him inside most of the day (to allow for his overnight mice hunting time). But it’s his nature to prey on birds. I believe we’ve minimized his success rate, but he’s still going to get a few. I’d like to believe that he’s culling out the less healthy ones, but that might be just a hope.

For some folks bird feeders attract other kinds of predators—especially hawks and even dogs. Since we’re home most of the time, we have never had a hawk close by, and our sweet dog ignores the feeder. But we are also aware that disease transmission can be a problem when birds crowd around a feeder.

So what’s the bottom line for us: Are we helping or harming our local birds? I believe that I can make a case for helping. Maybe the cat gets a few, but the birds are generally healthier than if they were on their own. Songbird mortality rates are quite high these days—what with withering habitat and plentiful predators (especially humans). I am conscientious about keeping the feeder always stocked and clean. We do our best to ward off predators. But I’m biased towards having birds around the place and am open to another conclusion.

Last of all, I’d like to think that our feeding efforts provide the local birds a little leisure time—and don’t we all like a little R and R… even birds?

April Waning Moon (left click to enlarge)

Cacophonous Cawers

A bird we hear more often than we see around here is the crow—more specifically, the American crow. You hear them frequently, because their call is loud and raucous and they’re likely to gather in a flock and engage in a bellowing tournament, as if to see which one of them can outshout the others. They are a funny bunch to listen to, as they get inventive and even a little silly, while engaging in their spontaneous spoutings.

The crow is a solid, big bird. It’s twice the size of a cardinal but outweighs it by a factor of 10. It takes some 40 chickadees to balance the weight of one crow! A crow is simultaneously ugly and beautiful. I guess maybe that dual feeling may be caused by its unsavory reputation, but when you see one close, you can’t help but admire the stark beauty of that absolute blackness. And it isn’t really utterly black, but has a gorgeous metallic sheen to it.

Crows have earned a repugnant reputation from gardeners—although we’ve never had one raid our tender veggie shoots, so we still like them. They are carrion eaters. On our back roads you’ll often see a crow lift into the air from the carcass of a squirrel, as you approach them around a curve. They also forage for garbage and are often plentiful around urban trashy areas. They walk with a strut, sort of a sailor’s swagger—looking cockier than a rooster. So they are not the cutest bird around, nor are their habits attractive.

Crows are one of our brainiest birds. They study other birds to gain an advantage (they love to steal food), they learn admirably well, and are excellent tool manipulators. They engage in complex social activities—one of the more noticeable being the aforementioned cacophonous chorus. Their flight is not the dipsy-doodle, undulating flight of smaller birds. They fly straight and strong—hence the expression “as the crow flies.”

But there also are times when the crow exhibits some amazing aerial acrobatics: when they’re going after a hawk. I recently glanced up to see a hawk perched in a nearby tree. I think a “caw” had caught my attention. Four crows were circling the larger predator and one dove straight at the hawk, who had to leap from its limb, lest that crow’s heavy bill impale it. Once in the air, all four crows aimed for the hawk. Even though it was twice the size of its harassers, the hawk fled down the creek with one crow literally on its tail, threatening to pull out one of its feathers.

Turn about is fair play, however, since I’ve also watched a handful of small songbirds (easily outweighed by one crow) close ranks and chase off the bigger black bird.

Each day I gain a little more appreciation for how some naturalists have made bird lore their life’s avocation. Many are the times that I’ve been stopped in my tracks by the arresting sight or sound of a bird. They are endlessly fascinating.

Spring Colors

Fibber Meter

In 2007 researchers in the Miniature Electronics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented a tiny device that is a very accurate lie detector. It senses both skin temperature and moisture level and then radios the data to a receiver, which analyzes the readings. It’s been shown in tests to have a 90% accuracy of discerning if the wearer is telling the truth or not. This device, known as FALSE (Factual Analyzer for Lies and Suspicious Emanations), can be disguised as an American flag pin and attached to the lapel of a suit.

The Psychology Department at Harvard then took up the research and conducted a one-year experiment, in which they implanted the FALSE sensor on several hundred unsuspecting subjects and monitored the number of lies they uttered. It was a double-blind experiment, in which those who attached the devices (they hired retired CIA agents) were kept incommunicado with those who recorded and analyzed the lie data.

Each subject was tracked for one week and the results were expressed as the average number of lies told each day. Here is a brief summary of the preliminary findings, as a function of the profession of the wearer of the FALSE sensor, in order of decreasing number of lies per day:

· Fox News broadcasters and radio talk show hosts: 100 (while on the air) and 30 (at other times)
· Lawyers: 75 (while in court) and 35 (at other times)
· Politicians: 60 (at all times)
· Bankers and corporate executives: 55
· Advertising agency personnel: 50
· Newspaper editors: 30
· Medical profession: doctors 15 and nurses 7
· The Shenandoah Hermit: 1

These are initial findings of an ongoing study. The research will continue, as other professions are being evaluated (some surprising findings about teachers and preachers have been leaked, showing some of them to score as high as 20). The scientists are also attempting to refine the results, to determine if the test subjects actually believed their lies, or were truly deceitful. (We all know which, in the case of politicians.) Stay tuned for the release of Phase 2 results, next month.

Down the Throat of the Iris

Sparse Space

If you go outside on a clear night in the country, you can see as many as 3000 stars with the naked eye. The sky seems filled with stars. Look at a photo of a distant galaxy taken by the orbiting Hubble Telescope and you see millions of stars and maybe several distant background galaxies. Space seems so full of planets, stars, and galaxies; and yet it’s vastly empty.

It’s hard to wrap your head around just how sparse space is, or just how far it is between the heavenly bodies we see out there. I’ve often tried to grasp the profound emptiness of it all, or to comprehend just how isolated our little planet is in this cosmic void, but it’s a very big stretch of imagination.

So here’s a way to get a feel for the barrenness of space—putting it in terms of distances we can more easily get a feel for. Let’s look first at our solar system. Our sun dominates it; over 99% of the mass of our solar system resides in the sun. Eight planets, a few proto planets (Pluto was recently designated as one of them), and countless asteroids… all orbit our sun.

To reduce our solar system to a more understandable scale, imagine the sun to be the size of a basketball. Place it on the goal line of a football field. To that scale, our Earth is the size of a fat grape seed, out at the 10-yard line… a wee grape seed revolving out there about 30 feet away. Mars is half that grape seed size, sitting out on the 15-yard line. Jupiter is the size of a walnut at midfield… a walnut out there 150 feet away! Let’s round out our solar system: Pluto is a tiny dot out there about 3 ½ football fields away. Thus, to this scale (the sun the size of a basketball), our solar system has a diameter of about seven football fields.

To consider celestial bodies beyond our solar system, we need to make the scale even smaller. Collapse those seven football fields down to a basketball, and then place that basketball-size solar system on the goal line again. Where’s the nearest star, Alpha Centauri? It’s five miles away. Nothing of any substance exists around our basketball-sized solar system, until you get out there five miles. That’s a pretty empty “local” stellar neighborhood!

Our solar system sits out near the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. So again, to this second scale, the center of our galaxy is 4000 miles away. That’s about the distance from Washington, D.C. to the Amazon. Let’s go one more: the nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda. By this scale, that closest galaxy (to our basketball-size solar system) is 360,000 miles away—or half again the distance to the moon. Pretty sparse territory.

One often hears talk about humans soon traveling by space ship to the stars. On old Star Trek episodes you can watch the USS Enterprise zip from one star system to another in a few hours. The reality of it is that these distances are far greater than we can imagine. Planet Earth is like a vanishingly small speck of dust on a vast ocean. Even though the universe has uncountable stars and planets, we’re pretty much alone. Maybe we’d better think of taking better care of our home—it is all we’ve got for the foreseeable future, until the far distant day when we just might span those incredible distances.