Surviving in the Winter
Photo by: Forest Hart
If you use a birdfeeder, have you noticed what else happens around your property?
Oh Yes! The squirrels find creative ways to exploit it. But wait, there is so much more that happens.
Let’s start at the very beginning, a good place to start. From early on, we have been taught NOT to feed any wildlife. And there are many reasons for that, most especially, wild beings are healthy when they seek their own food, and play an important role on the landscape by doing so.
Birds are wildlife! So why feed them? So often, I have heard this as the reason: “I like to see them.” But what about what the birds need? They need habitat to thrive both in summer AND winter. Plant that habitat and they will come …you will see them!
But what if you still insist in feeding them….so you can see them?
First, know that the bird feeding industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. Most often sunflower seeds are produced from plants grown in huge monocultures of sunflowers. And as a result are sprayed with pesticides.
Once you hang your birdfeeder, you will not only welcome birds to eat the seeds covered with these poisons, but also all kinds of rodents, from squirrels, chipmunks, mice and rats. By feeding rodents, you are increasing their reproductive rate ….making more babies. And rodents are very efficient at doing that. Rodents are also the reservoir for the Lyme disease organism. The more rodents, the more potential for Lyme disease
WAIT! OH NO! Before you know it, rodents are in your house, basement or garage, under your deck. NOW how do I fix this? Use the poisons, right? Most often poisons that are readily available on hardware store shelves cause the rodent to slowly bleed to death. So they eat the poison in your house or garage, then go back out in nature where a predator will catch them for their food: eagles, hawks, owls, coyotes, mountain lions, foxes …..
The poison in the rodents that a coyote (or other predators) eats keeps building up more and more in their own body, thus causing their immune systems to be depressed. And with that, the predator most often is attacked by the parasites causing the MANGE. Most often, the Coyote and others will slowly die a miserable slow death.
Like all things in Nature, everything is connected. Your actions do affect the larger system on Earth. Wild Lives are trying to tell us humans:
Please don’t feed the Birds!
