by Darryl Jones
It would, however, be both mischievous and unfair to suggest that the messages from the Northern Hemisphere are all positive and that the numerous concerns are being ignored. This is most certainly not the case. All the prominent groups provide clear advice on key issues such as minimizing the spread of disease and situating feeders to reduce the chance of predation. Indeed, discounting the periodic hysterical antifeeding articles and sensationalist exposé, many of these issues are regularly discussed and debated; there are certainly plenty of dissenting opinions about all manner of topics.17 The sheer scale of interest and participation in wild bird feeding provides a lively platform for the exchange of ideas, allowing any interested feeder an endless supply of suggestions, advice, and warnings.
I would make the claim, however, that some of the most important questions concerning feeding have not been adequately answered and some have not even been asked. Indeed, the truly astonishing thing is that for such a common and popular activity, participated in daily by millions of people worldwide, supplied by a huge and effective industry, and ably promoted by prominent advocacy groups, there remain many aspects of feeding we really do not understand. The amount of reliable research into most of these issues has been remarkably limited. It is fair to say that many of both the strident claims of the opponents (“Feeding causes dependency” or “Feeding leads to poor chick nutrition”) and the equally confident statements of the proponents (“Feeding increases chick production” or “Feeders are better conservationists”) have not—until very recently—been based on sound scientific studies.
And this really matters. Like any other person providing food to wild birds, I would be alarmed if I was to learn that this simple pastime was in any way detrimental to the very creatures I care for and about. Similarly, I would be pleased to learn that my actions were actually benefiting these wonderful animals. But this is most decidedly not simply about just me—or just you. Each of us might be concerned mainly about our own backyard, but we need to be aware that we are also part of a truly international activity, a colossal experiment on a global scale.18 That’s going to be a large amount of supplementary food and a very large number of participating birds. I think that it is time to take a close and careful look at what we are involved in.
A Supplementary Feeding Experiment on a Global Scale
I have made some claims as to the scale of wild bird feeding already, with bold statements about the numbers of people involved and the amounts of foods provided. Almost everything written about this activity includes some version of such figures, usually gleaned from the same relatively small number of studies. While this is fairly normal practice in science writing, it is also important to return to the original publications to make sure we are being accurate. This approach is an essential part of the approach being taken in this book: if the story that unfolds is to be accepted, every aspect has to be balanced and fair yet skeptical and critical. I fully expect my own ideas and explanations to be challenged. So let’s start with the numbers of feeders we are talking about.
Before we start, we need to clarify what this actually means. The figures provided by researchers are almost always in the form of a proportion (or percentage) of a group. Stating, for example, that “157 people surveyed in a particular place said that they provided food for birds” is meaningful only if we know how many people made up the whole sample and how these people were selected or contacted. The resulting proportion is usually called the “participation rate.”
The earliest and very widely quoted estimate comes from one of the first quantitative investigations of the patterns of bird feeding in suburban gardens. The study was conducted by British researchers Richard Cowie and Shelley Hinsley in the 1980s.19 They reported an unexpectedly high figure of 75% of households engaged in bird feeding. Although the study was conducted entirely within two suburbs of northern Cardiff in Wales, this figure has been endlessly cited as being representative of the United Kingdom as a whole. It was, nonetheless, a level of participation that surprised everyone, including the researchers. Indeed, despite many subsequent surveys from several countries, the Cardiff figure remains among the highest reported anywhere. For this reason alone, it is entirely reasonable to ask why, because it suggests potential problems with many similar surveys.
First, it is important to note that Cowie and Hinsley were not attempting to come up with a definitive proportion of the population of their city who were engaged in feeding birds (and they were certainly not expecting their data to be extrapolated to the entire country). Rather, they were much more interested in what the feeders (the people) were actually doing: their stated aim for this study was “to assess the types and amounts of food that are provided and how it was presented.” Their work was pioneering and remains influential, but it was designed primarily to obtain information about the activities associated with bird feeding. Their data were collected the hard way, by door-to-door delivery of a questionnaire, with the responses collected in person a few days later. Even with so direct and personal an approach, the response rate will never be perfect; people will be away (or hiding), mistakes may be made when completing the forms, and some people will simply not be interested. Such was the case in Cardiff: of the 287 hand-delivered surveys, 73% (209) were able to be counted in the study. The response rate was somewhat higher than most mail-out surveys, and the researchers would have been relatively pleased with their efforts. Nonetheless, this meant that more than a quarter of the sample were not completed for unknown reasons or, more important, because the respondents expressed “no interest.” The unresponsive component of the survey were subsequently assumed by the researchers to be nonfeeders. This leaves us with the 157 surveys mentioned above, which provides the now famous 75% (157 of the 209 acceptable completed surveys).
This rather tedious divergence into primary-school arithmetic does have a point. Rather than being an indication of “the proportion of Cardiff households engaged in feeding” (or even of the UK), the figure cited would more appropriately be called “the proportion of respondents of two samples of suburban Cardiff who returned surveys.” The people who responded were also more likely to complete the questionnaire because they were feeders, and maybe because they were pleased someone had asked about their pastime. These are normal problems associated with the completion of questionnaires on any topic, and there are various ways that researchers can deal with them. My point is that a common form of bias is likely to affect many similar surveys: they are likely to result in an inflated proportion of feeders responding than nonfeeders. The figures are still useful, but we must not assume that they are truly representative of the community being sampled.
With that caution in mind, what else did Cowie and Hinsley find? It turns out that the 75% refers quite specifically to the proportion of Cardiff feeders who fed during the winter months. Throughout the warmer months (May to September), the level of participation dropped to less than 40% of households (among the survey respondents). But even allowing for generous overestimation, these figures still represent a lot of people. For those interested in the new and relatively unexplored fields of the ecology of towns and cities—“urban ecology”—such a high level of influence over foraging resources was definitely worth noting. At the time, however, only a few scientists were taking urban ecology seriously.
A Brief Detour via Wagga Wagga
Around this time (the early 1980s), I was a young and naive student attempting to understand something about the rapidly changing bird community of my hometown in the dry interior of New South Wales. I had grown up in the quintessentially Australian town of Wagga Wagga (pronounced “Wogga Wogga,” Wiradjuri Aboriginal for “many crows”), a thriving country center famous for producing well above the expected number of sporting stars. Being demonstrably useless at most sports, I followed my growing interest in natural history to university elsewhere but returned home to undertake my first independent research project. The decision to study the birds in town rather than in natural areas away
from the influence of humans was not viewed particularly favorably by my peers and academic advisers. In terms I was to become all too familiar with during the following years, these critics regarded true ecology as being about entirely natural environments, devoid of any elements of human activity. If ecological research required avoiding all anthropogenic influences, urban environments were simply impossibly tainted. For many traditional ecologists, the very concept of “urban ecology” was just too hard to accept.
These were theoretical considerations for the future, however, and with the strong support of other mentors I plunged into the wilds of Wagga. The impetus for my interest in local urban birds was the recent and unexpected arrival of a new bird: the European (Eurasian or Common) Blackbird. While the town supported a large and diverse suite of native species (including crows, of course), there were also plenty of largely British species that had been introduced during the disastrous period of “acclimati-zation” in the 1860s.20 These introductions included House Sparrows and Tree Sparrows, Greenfinch and Goldfinch, and Starlings. The addition of the Blackbird to this list in this location was, however, completely unan-ticipated. We all knew this jaunty songster from the cooler, wetter, more English-weather places in southern Australia, but to see them scampering about among the dry-country garden plants of the arid inland seemed all wrong. How could they survive here? How did they get here? What were they finding to eat? These were the types of questions that initiated my lifelong fascination with wildlife in cities. And also with the way the human residents interact with these creatures.
Although I was vaguely aware that some people around town regularly fed birds in their gardens, it was during my bird surveys that I slowly began to realize that the concentrations of magpies, parrots, and native pigeons I was recording related to several generous feeders. Quite clearly, the presence of feeding stations was having a major influence on the density of certain species, both positively (for those attracted to the food) and negatively (for those wanting to avoid these aggregations). This early contact with bird feeders also exposed me to the sometimes strong attitudes feeders held toward certain species or categories of feeder visitor. For example, magpies were always welcome, corvids never; colorful plumage was favored over black or dull; and finches (even including the introduced species) were especially enjoyed while the sparrows barely tolerated. These attitudes and opinions were simply part of the entertaining but hardly relevant background to my “real” quantitative data on species richness and diversity. I would realize only later that such information was just as important to my attempts at understanding bird feeding.
Estimating How Many People Feed Birds
The Wagga Wagga urban bird study21 was the first of a long series of such projects conducted over the next few decades, which I continued when I moved to complete my graduate degree at the newly established Griffith University in Brisbane. Through a combination of strategic career planning, professional inertia, and satisfaction with the optimal location, I have now been based in Brisbane for over thirty years. Throughout this time I have been involved in a wide variety of urban ecology research projects involving many different approaches and disciplines. The central objective of almost everything I have engaged in has been to attempt to understand more about the way people interact with wildlife in urban settings. This broad canvas has included attempts to solve wildlife-human conflicts, base wildlife management plans on behavioral insights, and discern why some species prosper in cities while others flounder. Key to all these projects has been a clear appreciation that understanding any of the inherent complexity associated with people-animal-ecosystem interactions is beyond a single researcher, methodology, or approach. Any success we have had comes down to a willingness to listen and learn and remain open to insights from unexpected places.
The foundation of this diverse suite of interrelated studies started with the fortuitous gathering of a group of keen but unsuspecting graduate students in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Somehow attracted to the general theme of wildlife-human interactions, each student pursued quite different projects, but all eventually included elements of relevance to bird feeding. Sometimes such aspects were unintended last-minute additions to a larger study. For example, Leoni Thomas’s multifaceted investigation of the origins and management of the many wildlife conflicts in the local region included a detailed questionnaire.22 Such survey instruments require careful development and testing to ensure that all the questions make sense to the respondents. Toward the end of this process, we were discussing the wording of a section aimed at finding out about people’s gardening practices. Out of the blue, someone casually asked, “What about bird feeding?” It is a measure of how far we have advanced to have to admit that we had not even considered this before. Feeding was simply not regarded as significant; the prevailing attitude was along the lines of: “Everyone in Australia knows you shouldn’t feed, so it’s going to be trivial.” Andrew Cannon, then at the British Trust for Ornithology, had already articulated this attitude: “Generally the more conservation-minded and knowledgeable individuals in Australia do not feed their garden birds.”23 We agreed, and so did almost everyone we spoke to. I recall stating confidently at the time, “Less than 10% feed, I’m sure,” when asked to predict the outcome.
Leoni’s questionnaire was mailed out to addresses in Brisbane picked randomly from voter rolls because we really wanted a true and representative sample of the general community. Although the eventual results were to provide invaluable information on a range of wildlife management issues, it was the responses to the straightforward question on feeding (“Do you provide food for wild birds at your home?”) that subsequently received all the attention. Contrary to all expectations, Leoni’s data indicated that 38% of respondents across the suburbs of Brisbane (Australia’s third-largest city) were engaged in feeding wild birds. This was big, unexpected, and for a lot of people unwelcome news. In presentations to community, conservation, and bird groups given soon after, we were often confronted with a range of reactions, from outrage at the “stupidity and ignorance” of these benighted people to that of genuine surprise at finding that a phenomenon so common could also be so invisible. Most frequently, however, was outright denial: it can’t possibly be true; the data collection, the methods, the analyses—somewhere we must have made a serious mistake. The latter reaction was so prevalent that we too began to doubt the findings.
And then the results of other studies began to roll in. Directly in response to Leoni’s Brisbane results, Briony McLees conducted a similar questionnaire survey in the southern city of Melbourne.24 I suspect she was motivated at least in part to show that Victorians were different from Queenslanders. They were: even more of them fed birds, with 57% of respondents admitting to the activity. Back in Brisbane, Peter Howard, investigating wildlife-human conflicts using various social science meth-odologies, and Dan Rollinson, who was studying the urban ecology of Australian Magpies (see Chapter 5 for further details), both undertook specific surveys of the feeding practices and attitudes of people in the Brisbane region. Despite taking entirely different methodological approaches, the apparent participation rates they discovered were almost identical: 38% and 37%.25 In 2007, Go Ishigame and Greg Baxter conducted a hand-delivered questionnaire survey (à la Cardiff) in rural and outer suburban areas in western Brisbane and obtained participation rates of between 36% and 48%.26 Admittedly, having so many samples from the same geographical area is not ideal, but this much data does point to an unequivocal conclusion: at least a third of the people in the Brisbane area feed birds. We are still guessing and extrapolating wildly, however, if we were to extend these figures to the whole of Australia. If only we had some sort of national sample.
The goal of gaining a broader picture of feeding across the country became a real possibility when I was approached by the national public media organization, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), to assist in developing an exciting urban wildlife project. WildWatch27 was something enti
rely new for Australia in that it was an attempt to discover how people from all over the country interacted with wildlife around their homes. The innovative aspect of this ambitious project was its use of a variety of media to both engage and communicate with the public. It all started with a high-quality television documentary that explored the extent to which wildlife now lived among us in our towns and cities. This show directly challenged the perception that wildlife lived away from the big towns, “in the bush” as Australians like to say, beyond the city limits. The documentary concluded with an invitation to participate in a Web-based survey, including an opportunity for people to post their own wildlife stories. Participation in the WildWatch survey was also continuously encouraged by regular features on ABC radio shows, an effective network of radio stations that form the only truly coast-to-coast media coverage in the country. Finally, on the basis of public responses to the survey, two follow-up television documentaries were produced, featuring real stories of people and the species they cared about. I was enthusiastically involved in this process as an adviser and particularly in the development of the online survey. Researchers are notorious for wanting to add too many questions, but I could hardly let the opportunity pass and successfully argued for a couple of questions on feeding. Well, that was the plan. Its success depended entirely on whether people were willing to be involved. In fact, could we be sure that Australians cared enough about the wildlife in their backyards to bother?