by Darryl Jones
I have been somewhat dismayed, therefore, to see how often this risk of disease spread is downplayed. With each outbreak, there is typically a campaign to reassure feeders that there is no need to worry. Certainly, keep an eye out for sick birds, and don’t forget to clean those feeders now and then, but whatever you do, don’t stop feeding! It’s hard to determine what motivates these reactions. Just general reassurance to a concerned public? Another sign of a decidedly defensive feeding movement? Industry concerns that sales may suffer? I really don’t know, but anything that attempts to minimize the responsibility of feeders to maintain the highest standards of hygiene is entirely irresponsible. Call me a bleeding heart, but it must always be about what is best for the birds.
9.Feeders care to see for pleasure.
Finally, real hope. I am still pondering the many implications of the research discussed in the previous chapter. Although people clearly feed for all sorts of reasons, to discover that the predominant motivations are care and pleasure and that these translate into a powerful emotional connection is enormously reassuring. It also explains in large part why so many people are engaged in this activity, are so committed, and why people from a wide range of countries around the world are involved. People are feeding because they want to help birds that they care about, whose visits bring them real pleasure. Simple. No, actually, it’s rather complex because the mix of influences and feelings and impulses will be different for every individual. But caring and enjoyment appear to be particularly salient.
Why reassuring? Because this combination of strong emotional connection to something people really care about is an excellent platform for change. People who care deeply about their birds are much more likely to do what is necessary to minimize the spread of disease, for example. Or to think about the quality of the food they offer. Or to appreciate their part in the much bigger picture that is global bird feeding. People who care will want to learn and then respond. It’s why this simple activity might actually be revolutionary.
Feeding Birds Can Change the World
A few years ago I organized a symposium on wild bird feeding as part of a big international bird conference. Among the people invited to participate was Rich Fuller, an English scientist now working at the University of Queensland, just across town from me. I was particularly pleased that Rich could attend as he has been involved in a number of the most important and influential studies into bird feeding ever conducted, delving into its patterns, practices, and implications in the United Kingdom. His research with a group of colleagues, mainly from the University of Sheffield and Exeter University, was part of a much broader investigation into the interactions of people and nature in urban environments, with a strong emphasis on understanding how ordinary people might be able to have real impacts on biodiversity conservation by the simple things they can do in their own gardens. The potential role of feeding wild birds was one of the key activities that might make a difference, given that private gardens make up one of the most important and extensive bird habitats in Britain. The studies were impressive and illuminating, of a depth and diversity unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Needless to say, Rich’s ideas and findings have been cited everywhere in this book.
The speakers at our symposium presented talks on a wide variety of contemporary studies to a large audience to whom the scientific study of bird feeding was fairly new. These included Josie Galbraith’s pioneering studies of feeding in New Zealand and the first outing of Renee Chapman’s comparison between Australia and the United Kingdom. Most of the people at the symposium seemed fairly surprised that there was this much scientific interest in what they probably considered a pretty mundane topic. As each of the speakers progressively constructed an ever-expanding picture of the enormous scale of the activity, its geographical reach, and some of the major ecological and societal consequences involved, the change in the audience’s attention was marked. Gee, I had no idea this stuff was so interesting or important, seemed to be the impression.
Rich was the final speaker, and the room was ready for some serious heavy-duty science. The hallmark of Rich’s work is his powerful, sometimes dauntingly sophisticated analysis. After all, he had modeled a wide number of the socioeconomic, demographic, and geographical factors influencing participation in bird feeding for the whole of Great Britain, then synthesized this into almost readable scientific articles. But rather than hit us with facts, graphs, and stats, Rich simply walked to the center of the stage, asked for the lights to be turned up, and told us a story from his childhood without props or visual aids. He related how growing up in the suburbs of inner London had not exactly been the best preparation for a keen young birder, but he got to know the best places in his local patch fairly well. And while happy enough spotting the modest number of usual species, he dreamed of seeing some of the more exotic species that he knew existed farther afield. “My universe was fairly constrained, and of course I yearned for a taste of the wider world of nature. But our modest back yard in the middle of London was hardly likely to yield anything that surprising,” Rich explained. He doesn’t remember how it came about because his parents had no interest in birds or feeding, but somehow he was able to set up a simple feeding platform with seed borrowed from his caged budgie and even a mesh bag of peanuts to hang from a branch. It wasn’t much but it did bring the tits and other locals into his garden where he could watch them up close.
And then came the day that changed everything, when suddenly anything seemed possible. “It was a cold winter’s day and I went out early to check the feeder. A couple of small birds were pecking at the peanut bag hanging nearby, and I knew immediately that they were not species I had seen before, even in the woodlands nearby. I watched them closely for quite a while, almost disbelieving my own eyes. They were Siskins, a species I knew were normally found in the pine forests of Scotland. To see them there in London was just extraordinary. How could something so unusual, to me, so exotic, have discovered my little bag of peanuts? At the time they were very unusual for the south of England, let alone at my place in the middle of the suburbs. To this day I recall that feeling of wonderment and delight. This experience really did change my life in certain ways. This was probably the origin of my lifelong interest in thinking about biodiversity in urban areas. And most certainly, it made me realize, even back then, that such a simple act—putting out some food to attract birds into your garden—can actually make a difference to the lives of people. It made me realize that life and nature is not that far away after all, even in big cities, and that can be a life-changing gift.”
While the symposium was an overwhelming success, and much of the information presented had been striking and informative, it was Rich’s data-free, heartfelt revelations that everyone remembered and that have continued to be talked about ever since. To decide to eschew the conventions expected of a scientific presentation was always a bit of a risk, but Rich told me afterward that he discarded the PowerPoint in favor of the personal because that was the essence of his main message: it is personal. Even a little emotional, that scary concept so disparaged among the supposedly objective and professionally disinterested scientists among us.
Rich has since moved further along this path, considering the various ways that people interact with nature and the importance of encouraging this, particularly among the increasingly large proportion of the global population now living in cities. As we move further away, both physically and psychologically, from natural environments in the places we live and work, the opportunities for engagement with nature appear to be diminish-ing. We are spending much greater amounts of our time inside. Children are much more likely to recreate by engaging with digital landscapes and less time in the open air than even a few decades ago. Even when children are outside, this tends to be during times of organized sporting or recreational routines, typically with close adult supervision. City kids tend to have extremely limited opportunities for unstructured time outside to roam and play. There may be genuine parenta
l concerns over perceived risks (involving strangers, accidents, animals, etc.), but an important consequence of this tendency, something that seems to be occurring worldwide, is a lessening of direct contact with nature. As mentioned earlier, this has been called the “extinction of experience,” inferring that perceptions of nature are more often derived indirectly rather than through tangible personal interactions or experiences, through television, the Internet, Grandma’s childhood stories, or even not at all.
We could go on to describe the many usually dire predictions about generations without this type of experience, as has been canvassed brilliantly by Richard Louv in his influential book, Last Child In the Woods.15 Instead, let’s consider some of the remarkable discoveries made about the benefits of contact with nature. This relatively new area of multidisciplinary research is verifying what many of us have always known intui-tively.16 For example, it has long been appreciated that the presence of companion animals appeared to calm and relax people, but the health and psychological benefits are now being measured and monitored with remarkably positive results. Many retirement villages, hospices, even prisons now have regular sessions where patients and inmates can simply experience the companionship of a gentle dog. Even such commonplace features as the presence of houseplants or fish tanks, views of natural landscapes, pictures of wildlife, and recordings of birdsong have been shown to reduce stress, speed up healing, and lower the number of medical interventions needed by patients in hospitals. Probably the most well studied of these concepts addresses the benefits associated with having access to green space.17 For people who live in apartment towers or work in the skyscrap-ers of large cities, an increasingly large number worldwide, simply being able to walk to a nearby park or reserve has been shown to greatly reduce anxiety, workplace conflict, and the prevalence of many medical conditions and lead to increases in a range of measurable states of well-being. Perhaps the most astonishing result to date, however, is recent neurologi-cal research into changes in brain structure—specifically, the connections among neurons (neural pathways)—for subjects who walked through a forested park compared to those who walked along a busy road. Not only did the relatively short walk in the park significantly lower stress and improve concentration, these effects were correlated with an increase in nerve connections within the brain. If you live in the city, it seems, just being “in” nature can change you mentally as well as physically.18
That’s the rather passive route to connecting with nature. With measurable effects even from such seemingly limited experiences as listening to natural sounds or wandering through a park, the next dimension of research into this realm is investigating how city dwellers can engage more deeply with natural environments and what the associated benefits are. Much of this work is focused on children, and there are now a plethora of programs in many countries currently under way that determine the numerous benefits of activities such as camping, bird watching, canoe-ing, wood carving, damming streams, and making mud pies. A worldwide movement, largely inspired by Richard Louv’s revelations, is showing that tactile interactions, free-form, unplanned and spontaneous opportunities for creative expression—something technically known as “play”—has enormous benefits socially and emotionally for the kids involved.19 Louv and others have been especially radical in suggesting that allowing kids to roam free, out of the sight of hovering parents, to explore, find, discover, and play, is an essential ingredient of childhood, necessary as the founda-tions that lead to resilient, sensitive, and considerate adults. The essential element, these experts argue, is letting this occur outside, in the open air, in direct contact with nature. What is astounding, profoundly sad as well as inspiring with all this is that these dramatic new interventions are actually necessary in the first place. They appear to be attempting to re-create what were probably the normal childhood experiences that many of us experienced before the advent of the digital age. Such are the conditions we find in the era of the Anthropocene. Radical solutions that reconnect us with nature.
What all these earnest and essential studies and programs seem to be telling us is that the world is in genuine need of simple, easy, local, safe, and personally appropriate ways to engage with the natural world. The benefits for physical and mental health and overall well-being, as well as positive personal interactions and relationships, may all be healthy outcomes. At least as important, there is growing evidence that people who feel more connected to nature—in a wide variety of ways—also tend to be more interested in the wider world and the state of the environment and more willing to be engaged in positive change. These studies also suggest that the surest way to appropriate these benefits is through direct contact. Deliberate, hands-on, dirty fingernails, try-it-and-see-what-happens contact.
In this light, your humble bird feeder takes on a new glow of relevance. It may simply be a way to attract nice birds or it may have a role in saving the world. Whatever its place in your life, it is most certainly more than just a place to see birds. Your feeder is one link in a gigantic chain, a strand in an enormous web, a node in a global communication network. Your private, personal action of providing food for birds changes the structure of an entire, interconnected ecosystem. Your decision to help may alter the dynamics of the evolutionary process and may assist in the process of natural selection in the form of facilitating the spread of diseases. Your feeder is connected, ultimately, to my feeder. My practices, in turn, will affect what happens at your place, eventually.
We think our feeders are for the birds. Our feeders are actually for us. But the birds don’t seem to mind. They continue to willingly bring their lives into ours by visiting, and so offer us wonder, hope, knowledge, and pleasure.
APPENDIX
Species Mentioned in the Text
Common name used in geographical context Scientific name
Plants
Kauri Agathis australis
Pink Pine Halocarpus biformis
Pōhutukawa Metrosideros excelsa
Rimu Dacrydium cupressinum
Birds
Adzebill (North Island) Aptornis otidiformes
American Goldfinch Spinus tristis
American Robin Turdus migratorius
American Tree Sparrow Spizelloides arborea
American Wood Duck Aix sponsa
Anna’s Hummingbird Calypte anna
Australian Magpie Cracticus tibicen
Bar-headed Goose Anser indicus
Bellbird (New Zealand) Anthornis melanura
Blackbird (Common) Turdus merula
Blackcap Sylvia atricapilla
Black-capped Chickadee Poecile atricapillus
Black Woodpecker Dryocopus martius
Blue Tit Cyanistes caeruleus
Bower’s Shrike-Thrush Colluricincla boweri
Brambling Fringilla montifringilla
Bullfinch Pyrrhula pyrrhula
Bush Wren Xenicus longipes
Brehm’s Tiger Parrot Psittacella brehmii
Bridled Honeyeater Lichenostomus frenatus
Buzzard (Common) Buteo buteo
Canada Goose Branta canadensis
Carolina Wren Thryothorus ludovicianus
Carrion Crow Corvus corone
Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs
Coal Tit Periparus ater
Cockatiel Nymphicus hollandicus
Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto
Common (Indian) Myna Sturnus tristis
Common Redpoll Carduelis flammea
Crane (Common) Grus grus
Dunnock Prunella modularis
Eastern Phoebe Sayornis phoebe
Eider (Common) Somateria mollissima
Emerald Dove Chalcophaps indica
Figbird Sphecotheres viridis
Fireback Pheasant Lophura ignita
Florida Scrub Jay Aphelocoma caerulescens
Galah Eolophus roseicapilla
Goldcrest Regulus regulus
Golden-crowned Kinglet Regulus satrapa
Goldfinch (European)
Carduelis carduelis
Great Grey Shrike Lanius meridionalis
Great Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos major
Great Tit Parus major
Greenfinch Carduelis chloris
Gray Butcherbird Cracticus torquatus
Greylag Goose Anser anser
Grey Warbler Gerygone igata
Haast’s Eagle Aquila moorei
Hihi (Stitchbird) Notiomystis cincta
Hooded Merganser Lophodytes cucullatus
House Finch Haemorhous mexicanus
House Sparrow Passer domesticus
Hutton’s (Chatham Island) Rail Cabalus modestus
Indigo Bunting Passerina cyanea
Jackdaw Corvus monedula
Kākā Nestor meridionalis
Kakapo Strigops habroptilus
Kea Nestor notabilis
Kererū Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae
Kestrel (Common) Falco tinnunculus
Kōkako (South Island) Callaeas cinerea
Laughing Kookaburra Dacelo novaeguineae
Laughing Owl Sceloglaux albifacies
Macleay’s Honeyeater Xanthotis flaviventer
Mallard Anas platyrhynchos
Marsh Tit Poecile palustris
Mauritius Fody Foudia rubra
Mauritius Kestrel Falco punctatus
Mauritius Parakeet Psittacula eques
Mistle Thrush Turdus viscivorus
