Your bird table is a death trap – here’s what to use instead
It is the much-heralded Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) Big Garden Bird Watch this weekend. This survey was started in 1979 in association with Blue Peter, it was extraordinarily popular and so was expanded for adults too.
Supplementary feeding has been shown to improve overwinter survival in some species. You would think feeding garden birds is definitely a good thing, but is it? There is no simple answer here. The RSPB has suddenly withdrawn flat bird feeders from sale on its website as it is considered possible that these might be spreading deadly diseases, especially to finches.
It is a shocking thought that all the iconic flat table type feeders, illustrations of which litter children’s story books, and that are still widely for sale everywhere, might well be harbouring diseases such as finch trichomonosis, which has been blamed for the decimation of the greenfinch population. As Dr Kate Plummer from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) explained: “Birds become sick, the disease spreads through their saliva and infected birds cannot swallow and then regurgitate it out, probably onto the table.” The best feeders are hanging feeders with no dish on the bottom. Even window feeders with flat dishes at the base should be avoided.
Bird feeding has become a massive industry. In 2019, the UK fed enough for 196 million garden birds, an astonishing half of the total number of birds in the countryside. About half of householders feed the birds with 50,000 -60,000 tons of feed. But how does this affect the balance of various species?
On my feeders, we have blue tits, more blue tits and the odd robin. We feed a wide range of foods, as you should if you want a wide range of birds: black sunflower seeds and sunflower hearts as well as quality peanuts, niger seed and high-energy seed mixes – all greatly appreciated. Live foods such as mealworms are expensive treats. I realise now that if I switched the foods and ditched the sunflowers, peanuts and fats that are favoured by the common tits and, instead, provided millet or cereals I might pull in declining House Sparrows and Tree Sparrows.
To add to the complication of this “simple” highly rewarding job that we (including the King) all love, we should clean our bird feeders weekly and of course the water bowls. Realistically very few of the nations’ feeders actually do this rather less satisfying job. To prevent build-up there are other vitally important things we should be doing. According to Jon Carter, media manager of the BTO, we should move the feeders regularly so dropped food does not accumulate and encourage disease in one area, and we should clear up under the feeders. The most important thing to do if you spot a sick bird in your garden is to stop feeding and putting out water immediately. It may seem harsh, but by withdrawing food you are stopping all that close contact (and disease spread) around your feeding stations.
Both Carter and Kate Plummer who has carried out much research on bird-feeding gain much pleasure from feeding their birds. As Plummer puts it: “I love watching the birds in my garden and, like approximately half of all households in the UK, I put out feeders to tempt them in. The pleasure of observing birds appearing almost instantly upon the hanging of a freshly filled feeder evokes a strong sense of connection with ‘my’ garden birds.”
But, as Plummer explains, “inevitably, feeding does affect the birds we see around us. We recently showed that our changing bird feeding habits can be linked to the large-scale restructuring of garden bird communities and the growth in urban bird populations in Britain. Feeders have become better at attracting a broader range of species over time, with many species using feeders much more frequently now compared to 40 years ago. As a consequence, the populations of feeder-using species have increased significantly in urban areas of Britain, while those of other urban birds (which do not use feeders) have remained stable on average”.
If we did reduce bird feeding and it resulted in a moderate fall in the numbers of blue tits, great tits, great spotted woodpeckers and sparrow hawks (who benefit from the rich pickings around a bird feeder), this would not be a disaster. These species would remain extremely common and would drop to a level more typical of elsewhere in Europe. By avoiding inflating the numbers of competitors and predators by rethinking our bird-feeding habits, we could give the likes of British marsh tits and willow tits a better chance of surviving the biodiversity crisis.
Carter also says that it is more useful to feed birds if you are in an urban environment. He has just moved to a more rural spot in Norfolk and is planting his garden with a diverse range of plants, including some “natural” water and providing cover from berrying shrubs and trees. He will provide supplementary feeding but only in harsh cold weather.
The environmental campaigner Chris Baines, who lives in Wolverhampton, has employed this approach in his rich suburban garden because, he says: “Bird feeders have made a great contribution to conservation, particularly as the range of foods has become ever more sophisticated. I enjoyed attracting birds to feeders for decades, but when ‘my’ greenfinches, siskins and other communal feeders began to disappear I chose to stop.
“The shrubs and seedheads around my urban wildlife garden are always busy with flocks of tits at this time of year, and the wrens, robins and blackbirds find plenty of natural food as they forage through the leaf litter and mulch in the borders. Most importantly, the garden pond outside my window attracts birds from the surrounding neighbourhood and provides me with plenty of nature-watching throughout the changing seasons.”
I would not be able to stop my husband from feeding the birds, even though with all the garden habitats I have created over the past 40 years: water, woodlands, hedges, meadows the place now almost ricochets with bird song. But I will make sure we put more effort into the all-important hygienic aspects.
