American Backyard Feeders
May Do Harm to Wild Birds

Last year, Americans spent $2.6 billion on birdseed. That's more than twice as much as they spent on prepared baby food, and two and a half times as much as they spent on food for needy nations. They shelled out a further $733 million on feeders, houses and baths for birds.

Most people think all that largess helps the birds. But many ornithologists and wildlife biologists say it does very little good -- and even does some harm. Attracting wild birds to feeders spreads disease, aids predators such as house cats, and lures the birds close to houses and roads where tens of millions of them fly into windows and cars. House cats and hawks treat feeders as fast-food outlets, snatching birds from perches or the ground below.

Birdseed attracts other mammals, too, and not just squirrels. Chipmunks, rats, raccoons, skunks and even bears feed on seed at night. That in turn prompts bird-loving homeowners to summon companies that trap or kill the intruders. "People who feed birds are our best customers," says Alan Huot, who runs Nuisance Wildlife Services, an animal-control concern in Simsbury, Conn.

Feeding birds is essentially a form of wildlife management -- yet another way that human beings, whether intentionally or not, impose their will upon nature. In many areas of the U.S., human actions have brought man and beast into closer proximity than ever before. The consequences of letting nature run wild are being felt far and wide: Skunks in the garbage. Squirrels in the attic. Moose on Main Street. While many species decline, those adapted to living with people are increasing their numbers.

Now, the hands-off approach to nature that grew out of the environmental movement of the 1960s is increasingly giving way to calls for the hands-on wildlife management pioneered by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and the conservation movement of a century ago. The idea of killing wild animals to bring populations into healthy balance is gaining ground again. Unlikely alliances have formed. A coalition of birders and trappers, worried about fox and feral cat predators threatening birds in California, recently beat back efforts by animal-rights groups to ban trapping as cruel. The Audubon Society is calling for more hunting. And local governments, defying animal-welfare constituents, are hiring sharpshooters to control deer populations.

The blurring of the boundary between man and beast can be traced to the regrowth of forests once cleared by pioneers and farmers. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 63% of the land east of the Mississippi that was forest in 1630, and then was cleared, is forest once again. In the Northeast, 72% of the forest is back, and increasingly so are the animals of that forest: bears, beavers, turkeys and moose among them.

The farmers are largely gone, too. They not only worked the land, but also vigorously managed the wildlife on it by shooting, trapping and otherwise killing wild birds and animals that threatened their crops and livestock. In their place: suburbanites, whose encroachment -- and in some cases whose political opposition to hunting and trapping -- has removed millions of acres of wildlife habitat from traditional control by state fish and game departments.

Sprawl dwellers had another important role. With their handouts of food, they helped create huge populations of so-called welfare wildlife.

Enter bird feeders. The majority of people who feed wild birds live in the eastern part of the country. What started as a winter activity in cold areas spread to warm climes. According to a survey done for Gutwein & Co., which sells Morning Song brand bird food, 83% of those who feed birds do so year-round, half are over the age of 40, and 44% are empty nesters, as it were. Two-thirds of birdseed buyers are women.

And they are putting lots of food into the wildlife environment, anywhere from 500,000 tons to 1.2 million tons annually, according to industry estimates, which vary widely. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says 52.8 million adults identified themselves as bird feeders in a survey last year. This number surpasses the nation's 34.1 million fishermen and 13 million hunters.

The wide popularity of bird feeding favors a relatively small subset of birds that frequent the feeders or the ground below them where spilled seed falls, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest research project of Harvard University. The practice also favors seed-eating mammals, and predators such as cats and hawks.

"By increasing the food supply, bird feeders encourage the rapid growth of animal populations," says Stephen Vantassel, a wildlife damage consultant in Massachusetts. Adds Bob Noonan, editor of trade magazine WCT, which stands for Wildlife Control Technology: "The first thing I tell people with nuisance-animal problems is that they have to remove these artificial food sources."

'Habitat Enhancement'

Pushing in the opposite direction is the bird-feeding industry, where the hottest trend is "backyard habitat enhancement" to attract more birds and wildlife, says Raymond David, who runs Birdwatch America, the industry's trade show. The trend includes planting the right bushes, putting in natural-looking ponds and landscaping -- all of which attract wild birds, but also other hungry animals.

Bob Heller, who owns the Wild Birds Unlimited franchise in Duluth, Minn., says he sells a lot of bear-resistant bird feeders, including one called "iron silo" that is made from cast iron. Still, he tells people to bring their feeders in at night when it's not bear hibernating season.

Like an African watering hole, a bird feeder brings animals in close proximity, and this can spread illness. House-finch conjunctivitis, an eye and respiratory disease first spotted in the eastern U.S. in the winter of 1993, for example, has been spread virtually nationwide through feeders infected by a well-known bacterium, Mycoplasma gallisepticum. The disease causes the birds' eyes to get encrusted and swell shut. Most die of starvation or predation. As a result, the house-finch population in the East has declined an estimated 60% in the past decade, according to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

"It's no different than kids in a kindergarten class," says Paul Barrows, former head of the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. "If one brings a cold, they all can get it."

Other diseases also are spread through infected feeders, which people should disinfect with bleach every two weeks, but few do. Avian pox causes body warts and breathing difficulties. Aspergillosis, a mold that can form on old or damp seed, makes birds lose weight and have trouble breathing and walking. Bird feces under feeders sometimes contain parasites and bacteria that infect ground-feeding birds.

Bird feeders also are suspected of contributing to the large numbers of birds that die flying into windows of commercial and residential buildings, estimated at anywhere from 98 million to nearly a billion birds a year. A 1992 study by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology found that window collisions caused 51% of backyard bird deaths, while cats accounted for 36% and disease 11%. Birding groups urge people who feed birds to drape their windows to prevent collisions, but this is a precaution that few take, experts say.

Some wildlife biologists worry that backyard bird feeders may be creating populations of dependent wintering birds. There also are concerns that feeders increase the numbers of nest predators such as grackles and blue jays, and that they might be altering bird migration patterns. However, the National Audubon Society says the few studies done in these areas suggest that such worries are unwarranted.

Birdseed-industry officials acknowledge that disease, predators and window collisions around feeders kill birds. But they argue that the number of these deaths is tiny in comparison to the total number of bird deaths. Bird-watching groups estimate that about half of all birds hatched die each year.

Hunting and trapping proponents note that the same could be said in support of their activities, but political correctness usually precludes this. "We could make the same argument," says Mr. Noonan, the magazine editor who is also a fur trapper in Canaan, Maine. "We remove surplus animals that are going to die over the winter."

The idea of selling seed to people to feed birds grew out of the livestock-feed business. One of these, Knauf & Tesch, a general store for dairy farmers in Chilton, Wisc., began selling bags of dried peas for racing pigeons in the late 19th century. In the 1940s, William Engler, the proprietor of Knauf & Tesch, got together with Simon Wagner of Wagner Bros. Feed Corp. in New York to package 25-pound bags of birdseed to sell at grocery stores.

Bird-Loving Boomers

Bird feeding took off in the 1980s and 1990s as baby boomers and their offspring sought to connect to nature in environmentally acceptable ways. A sizable industry developed because it is an easy and inexpensive way to watch birds, and because most people who feed birds think their hobby is benign, or even helpful to the birds.

George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy, a conservation group, says there are dangers associated with bird feeding. But he says the positives for people -- getting them back to nature, into bird watching and for conservation -- outweigh the negatives.

At the Millerton Agway gardening center in Millerton, N.Y., birdseed virtually flies out of the store in wintertime, says manager Paul O'Neil. Included in his stock are hundreds of pounds of bulk mixture, seed-infused suet cakes, and specialty packets to attract specific species of wild birds.

Especially popular for feeding finches is the niger seed, a small black oilseed often misnamed as thistle. Americans import more than 70 million pounds of it annually from Ethiopia, India, Nepal and Burma as birdseed. Human-rights groups, calling Burma's military junta one of the world's most oppressive regimes, have urged feeders to boycott niger seed. Mr. O'Neil says he has seen no effect on sales.

His best seller is sunflower seed, which many people buy in 50-pound bags. Farmers in South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota grow about two million acres of sunflowers, worth about $315 million, and one-fourth of it goes to feed birds, according to the National Sunflower Association. And this has put them in a quandary.

Each fall, red-winged blackbirds migrating south swoop down in giant flocks on the ripening crop and cause up to $20 million in damage. Some farmers have their entire crop wiped out. The industry is asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services to come in and poison perhaps six million blackbirds over three years. The National Audubon Society thinks killing red-winged blackbirds to save seeds for bird-feeder birds is a dumb idea. An environmental-impact statement is in the works.

Write to James P. Sterba at jim.sterba@wsj.com¹

Updated December 27, 2002