Bird feeding is intended to help birds, but what’s not as well known is how much the practice helps the people who fill the feeders.
Just a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, internet searches for bird feeding and bird baths surged as people who were suddenly closed off from the rest of the world were searching for ways to connect to the outdoors safely.
“People throughout the world were forced to remain close to home,” writes Darryl Jones, a researcher at Griffith University in Australia. “Aspects of life that seemed to be carrying on regardless, such as birds arriving each day to be fed, may have been a course of comfort and reassurance. These trends mean the simple, common practice of attracting birds to your garden by feeding them is taking on much greater significance for the welfare of both birds and people.”
But even before pandemic, people’s fascination with wild birds has been strong for a long time and feeding them goes right along with it.
Ashley Dayer, an associate professor at Virginia Tech, argues in recently published research, not only for the acknowledgment of bird feeding’s benefit to humans, but that it should play a role in public guidance and policy.
“Wildlife agencies and others making decisions on managing bird feeding need to be considering not only what the science is behind what’s going on with birds, but also the science behind what’s going on with people,” Dayer said.
Dayer and colleagues are conducting what is perhaps the first large-scale bird feeding research that also incorporates observing humans.
“People are not only reporting what they see at their bird feeders, but also their emotional responses to it,” Dayer said. “It’s pretty fun because most citizen science projects focus just on the natural or physical science, but we’re now able to look at the human piece of it.”
Funded recently as part of a more than $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant, the four-year project aims to engage more than 10,000 bird feeders across the United States. Dayer said interest in the topic began in 2021, when the researchers began to notice state agencies advising people to stop feeding birds in response to various avian disease outbreaks.
After looking into it, they found that 23 states had made such recommendations without evidence it would decrease disease spread, with varying levels of pushback, and with no real method of gauging compliance, much less its impact on people.
The new project is an extension of the work Dayer and Dana Hawley, Virginia Tech professor of biological sciences, began about six years ago.
Hawley said the lack of information about humans related to bird feeing was something she’d not previously considered, and she found it a strong motivator for this project.
“In all my years of studying how bird feeding impacts wild birds, I didn’t give much thought to how it can also impact the people that spend their time and money feeding and watching birds,” Hawley said. “I get calls every year from people who see a sick bird at their feeder and want to know how they can help prevent disease spread. All in all, this made me wonder about how policy decisions that aim to minimize disease spread can inadvertently impact the people who feed the birds.”
To help find those answers, the research team uses Project FeederWatch’s existing network of bird enthusiasts.
Operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada for the past 37 years, FeederWatch asks participants to observe and report what they see at their feeders from November to April.
“FeederWatch is such a versatile data set even though, at its core, it is based on simple bird counts,” said Emma Greig, project leader for FeederWatch. “When you overlay information about behavior, disease, habitat, and climate change with those bird counts, we can get amazing insights into ecology and evolution.”
During this project, FeederWatch participants also will be asked to observe their own well-being. Dayer said about 8,000 submissions came in from the first week of this season alone.
Such passion for birds is something Dayer understands very well. She said her mother always made sure they had bird feeders outside their family’s home, and when she became an “empty nester,” the birds became almost like children.
“She’ll go on vacation and cut the vacation short because she needs to go home and feed her birds,” Dayer said. “So I’ve lived with someone who was really into bird feeding and have seen how important it can be to them.”
But Dayer believes the positive impact of bird feeding isn’t limited to enthusiasts and is important in proving one of the most widely accessible connection to wildlife.
“People in urban areas can feed birds. People with just a deck can feed birds. People with a wide range of physical abilities can feed birds. So it’s just a great way to keep that human connection to wildlife,” Dayer said.
Hawley agreed with that sentiment, and said she hopes their work helps advance policies that will foster both health and healthy relationships.
“In a world where so many of us live in cities or suburbs, having birds visit feeders in our yards or on our balconies is one of the only ways we get to connect daily with wildlife. But people want to be able to feed birds in ways that keep wild bird populations healthy and thriving,” Hawley said. “Our work will ideally help us develop guidelines for bird feeding that minimize risk to wild birds and maximize the benefits to the people that feed them.”