In the last column, I discussed the positive benefits of bird feeders and noted that no evidence exists to show that birds become dependent on feeders. Growing and selling birdseed is big business with sales of seed and feeders exceeding two billion dollars per year.\u00a0 Over 50 million Americans are involved with some level of bird feeding and observation around their homes.\u00a0 Such broad interest has not always been so.<\/p>\n
Today, we\u2019ll look at the history of bird feeding in North America. This topic has long been a research interest of mine. This column benefits greatly from information in Feeding Wild Birds in America by Paul Baicich and others.<\/p>\n
Bird feeding is a two-way street.\u00a0 We feed the birds to help them survive but also feed to lure the birds closer to us so that we may enjoy their beauty and behavior.<\/p>\n
We can start in 1854 with Henry David Thoreau.\u00a0 In his classic reflection Walden, he writes of tossing half a bushel of unripe corn just outside his cabin and watching the various animals that were attracted to the corn, including Blue Jays and Black-capped Chickadees.<\/p>\n
We fast-forward to 1898 when Florence Merriam Bailey began teaching bird classes to teachers in the District of Columbia. Bailey had recently graduated from Smith College and had been actively involved in battling the harvest of egrets.\u00a0 These birds were being slaughtered in large numbers because their breeding plumes had become fashionable in women\u2019s hats.<\/p>\n
Bailey showed that nailing a few bones and suet to a tree attracted a diversity of birds.\u00a0 She recommended grains and table crumbs as well.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Elizabeth Davenport in Vermont fed the birds a diversity of seeds as well as cornbread.\u00a0 She kept careful records, documenting over 20 bird species at her feeders.<\/p>\n
Anna Botsford Comstock, a professor at Cornell University, started the Nature Study program for children.\u00a0 Kids were encouraged to feed birds and make observations on them. The Nature Study program continued into the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n The venerable table feeder was in use by the end of the 19th<\/sup> century. Window feeding-trays appeared in the early 1900\u2019s.\u00a0 Bird feeding was encouraged by the National Audubon Society\u2019s magazine, Bird-Lore and by two books on attracting birds by Bradford Torrey and Njelte Blanchan.<\/p>\n Even at this early stage of bird feeding, authors and observers noted the dual benefits of bird feeding: helping birds survive and attracting birds to enjoy them.\u00a0 Suet was recommended as a most valuable food.\u00a0 We concur with this advice as fat is more calorie-rich than carbohydrates or proteins. Birds store fat to fuel their migrations, their over-night shivering and other activities.<\/p>\n By 1910, more sophisticated bird feeders began to appear. Hans Berlepsch, a German, had begun to design bird feeders that minimized waste. His bird bell (a silo-like contraption in which seeds fell onto a tray) was one of the most popular.<\/p>\n Waldo Lee McAtee, a federal biologist, advocated using coconuts or tin cans with small holes as feeders.\u00a0 Such feeders minimize the loss of food.\u00a0 The holes could be made small to allow chickadees access but not larger birds that tended to outcompete chickadees at a feeding table.<\/p>\n The first suet feeders appeared at about this time. Rather than simply tying or nailing suet to a tree, people began to make suet boxes from wood or metal. Some people mixed seeds in with the suet.<\/p>\n House Sparrows sometime dominated bird feeders.\u00a0 Many people found this introduced species undesirable.\u00a0 Clever inventors produced feeders that allowed agile chickadees to get to the food but not relatively clumsy House Sparrows.<\/p>\n Commercial bird feeders became widely available in the 1920\u2019s and bird feeding continued to increase in popularity.\u00a0 To be sure, World War I and the Great Depression forced cutbacks in bird feeding but bird feeders were a common sight in 1940.\u00a0 We\u2019ll continue in the next column.<\/p>\n [Originally published on December 13, 2015]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n In the last column, I discussed the positive benefits of bird feeders and noted that no evidence exists to show that birds become dependent on feeders. Growing and selling birdseed is big business with sales of seed and feeders exceeding two billion dollars per year.\u00a0 Over 50 million Americans are involved with some level of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[921],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":772,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}