by Darryl Jones
The quantity of fowls of different kinds caught up in this season is incredible, owing to the hardship they are exposed to for want of food; finding their usual supplies locked up from them, the hardy bird of prey is taken by hand, while the sweet linnet and sparrow are cramped with cold and die. The poor seagulls, in great flights, are displaying their token of necessity, by approaching the houses, and scrambling for the crumbs at the door.32
These “crumbs,” token offerings of assistance in a time of need, become ubiquitous in accounts from this period, as was feeding as an expected form of duty. An 1855 letter to the editor of the Kendal Mercury suggests the practice as common and compassionate:
Sir,—The birds mentioned in my last letter were those which seek shelter, during severe weather, around the homesteads of man. Their presence in his windows is a sure sign of the failure of food; and generally some member of the house, pitying their wretched appearance, has compassion enough to offer them a more bountiful supply than they can gather from the mere crumbs about the doors. We should, indeed, be sorry to see this ancient season of feeding the robin,
“Thrive happy creature! In all lands
Nurtured by hospitable hands,”
. . . from time immemorial, drop into disuse. To a child this duty of casting a few crumbs of bread on the windowsill, we may look upon as an early lesson in morality. Thus may our child’s sympathy for a fellow-being in dis-tress, be early excited, and tutored by the agreeable occupation of feeding birds in winter.33
There are also fleeting references to a more community-based form of feeding. The Edinburgh Evening News of February 1875 mentions that a “society of feeding birds in the winter” has established twenty-two feeding stations in the town, providing three meals per day.34 The expense in-curred, it is explained, will be “repaid a hundredfold by the destruction of injurious insects.” Such collective action would certainly be a significant development for this narrative, but unfortunately no further details have come to light as yet.
It is during this period that one of the seemingly defining events in our story—“an apparently pivotal moment” according to David Callahan35— occurs in Europe. The 1890–1891 winter was early, long, and brutal, affecting all of Europe and northern Africa. In terms of scale of impact and the temperatures recorded, that winter is regarded as the most severe in the nineteenth century.36 In the UK, the worst conditions were experienced during the Great Blizzard of 9–12 March 1891. Extensive snow-drifts and powerful storms swept repeatedly through the south and west of England, sinking fourteen ships and resulting in the loss of 220 lives. While conditions were clearly life-threatening for many humans, somehow, in the trauma that followed, the plight of wild birds was brought to the public’s attention by the nation’s many newspapers. Correspondents from the countryside and the cities, appalled by the toll (“Under hedges and bushes their dead bodies, consisting of not more than feathers, skin and bones, are frequently to be seen”), described vividly the situation as they perceived it, and implored people everywhere to “reach out and help the birds.”37 Recipes, suggestions, and advice were published widely and appear to have been heeded by so many that we may regard this event as marking the start of winter feeding at a national scale, in England at least.38 Spontaneous, opportunistic feeding continued as always; this new mode was, however, deliberate, regular, and, to an important extent, planned.
The drama of the times can be glimpsed through an exchange of letters to the London Daily News written in the midst of the 1890–1891 storms (30 December 1890):
Sir,—I am much obliged for your kindness in reminding your readers of their duties to our friends, the birds. Their suffering is far greater than any can re-alise who are not frequenters of our woods and fields. It would be great service if some of your better-informed readers were to supply us a little more studiously with information as to the most suitable food, and the best mode of supplying it.39
T. C. Williams
This heartfelt request is granted from an unexpected scribe: 40
Sir,—In the name of my brothers and sisters of every “wing,” I thank you for the kind manner in which you have provided for us in this time of bitter cold and hunger. We can only promise to show our gratitude to the kind friends who have given us food that when next summer comes again, we will sing our very best songs and gobble up every worm and grub that we can possibly find.
I remark that there is a division of opinion on what is the best form in which to feed us. Now a very dear friend of ours makes up (with her own hand, I believe) a delightful compound with which she feeds us three times a day. Made as this recipe: Half a stale loaf or any odd pieces of bread reduced to a pulp with warm water. Add more water and stir in oatmeal or barley meal or both, and then a few handfuls of hempseed. This mixture made into a thick stiff paste which we can all sup with our bills, and the small-fry—those perky tits, chaffinches, sparrows, etc., which abound everywhere, are equally delighted with the crumbs. That ill-bred, vulgar family of birds, the starlings, are most troublesome over this mixture, and the modest, gentle thrushes and blackbirds often have great difficulty in procuring any, but in the end all get a “pick” and very grateful we are.
I am, your grateful but starving,
Johnnie Thrush
From such evocative prose was seemingly born a profound and, to an important extent, permanent change in feeding practice.
It is worth dwelling on this event for a moment. As the historian David Elliston Allen explains,41 prior to this blizzard such concerns would have been generally regarded as thoroughly unacceptable. “Worse, it infringed the Victorian domestic code. In that Golden Age of Home Economy waste was an anathema. Stale bread was either saved for puddings or converted into breadcrumbs. The place for other scraps was in the stock pot for soup.” Yet, the “long frost of 1890–91 finally seems to have broken down resistance.” From this point, at least in the towns, the habit caught on. Only a few years later, Allen reports [during a prolonged cold period] “hundreds of working men and boys would take advantage of the free hour at dinner time to visit the bridges and embankments of the Thames to give scraps left from their meals to the birds.”42 One wonders what Her Majesty thought of such behavior.
The Baron
The next milestone on our journey would better be marked by a roadside monument, grandiose and, although weathered and lichen encrusted, yet still conveying the triumph of reason and science. We can identify the year as 1908, but the period to which it refers covers the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. This date refers to the appearance of the English translation of a treatise published in German the year before, eventually to be issued in six languages and which ran to twelve editions. This book, How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds: A Full Description of Successful Methods,43 provides the most compelling evidence of the advent of a modern approach to bird feeding, as well as exemplifying the growing international interest in nature conservation and a more direct action by governments and citizens. The place of this work in the history of bird feeding definitely justifies our discussing it in a little more detail.
Although written by Martin Hiesemann, How to Attract was entirely focused on the extraordinary efforts of Baron Hans Freiherr von Berlepsch (1857–1933), a German nobleman who used his ancestral estate of Seebach in Thuringia, central Germany, to conduct experimental ornithology on a spectacular scale. Having a passion for both bird conservation and scientific research methods, Baron von Berlepsch spent over thirty years developing and, as he would say, “perfecting” his practical solutions to the perceived decline of birds. He published his findings in a series of scientific papers in national journals and synthesized these along with practical instructions in a book that appeared in 1899;44 much of the material collated by Hiesemann is derived from these works. Von Berlepsch’s approach was ruthlessly rational; a colleague, Dr. Kartent commented: “He owes his success to the fact that he carries his experiments from a purely scientific point of view, without sentimentali
ty or exaggeration.”45 Nonetheless, he was no heartless utilitarian either. “We do not protect birds solely because they are useful, but chiefly from ethical and aesthetical reason, as birds give beauty and animation to Nature.” His motivation was to devise practical and proven means that could be employed by the public to sustain beautiful and useful species of bird; it did help having a huge estate, well-trained staff, and presumably an inherited fortune at his disposal.
The Seebach estate covered 500 acres, 80% of which was relatively undisturbed woodland with the rest being ornamental parkland and a plantation of poplar and willow. Seemingly all of these lands were utilized in the baron’s studies. The most important element of his experimentation was the installation of nest boxes throughout the estate. Today, nest boxes are a standard technique for research into the breeding of many species of birds, sometimes using large arrays of boxes. In Chapter 5, for example, I describe a study of tits that involved a staggering 800 nest boxes. Yet over a century earlier, von Berlepsch had erected a total of 2300, most attached to trees in the woods. Critically, these boxes were most definitely not your mail order “Blue Bird Standard” type box. Guided by the baron’s own “design with Nature” principles, they were all-natural cuts of wild tim-ber with internal cavities precisely replicating those of actual woodpecker nests. The title of the book was entirely accurate: it was full of directions, dimensions, and measurements showing the well-trained and equipped naturalist exactly How To, as well as helpful diagrams of “Right and Wrong Installations” and examples of “Worthless Imitation.”
The eventual outcome of these decades of labor and development of von Berlepsch’s “rational system for the protection of birds” came down to three fundamental activities: the creation of opportunities for breed-ing; “suppression of the enemies of birds”; and winter feeding. The first of these was addressed through the use of nest boxes and the wide-scale manipulation of vegetation to provide shelter for nests. The second— the deliberate and sustained eradication of what were mostly natural predators—will strike the contemporary reader as being seriously nonecological in outlook, but we must be careful not to assess these attitudes from current perspectives. When the view of the day meant that “progress gives [Man] the right, or rather obliges him to restore the balance of Nature,” and one’s chief concern was the protection of songbirds, it made sense to offer rewards for the “capture and death” of all “mammals, sparrows, goshawks, sparrowhawks, jays, magpies, crows and shrikes.” Common Blackbirds were included in this list “should they increase at the expense of the nightingales.”
It is, of course, the baron’s approach to feeding that will be of the most interest here. As expected, he had some strong opinions. He was typically unsympathetic to those he regarded as irrational and sentimental: “Kind-hearted people have always taken pity on our feathered guests. But often the results have been out of proportion to the means employed. [They] feel satisfied and proudly conscious of having done a good deed; they do not pay attention to the fact that they have in no way relieved the birds.” And when should feeding occur? “Birds only need feeding during and after certain changes in the weather, especially during blizzards and intense frost.” For von Berlepsch, feeding was primarily a rescue mission, a temporary but vital form of assistance when small birds were at their most vulnerable. For the baron, this meant winter only.
That’s the when; what about the how? It is in the design and operation of his four feeding “appliances” that we see the baron at his most innovative and instructive—and pedantic. His “Food-Bell” and “Food-House” are designs instantly familiar to the modern feeder, being obvious precursors of hopper and roofed platform feeders, respectively. What is startlingly unexpected is their sophisticated, industrial, somewhat overde-signed appearance. These are clearly well-advanced models, not early pro-totypes, strongly suggesting a period of preceding iterative development. To me, progressively looking for new “fossils” to add to the bird-feeding evolutionary tree, discovering the baron’s “Food-Bell” was akin to un-earthing a cell phone in a Neanderthal excavation. It’s just too sudden, a quantum jump in complexity. And, as in the story of human evolution, it probably means that we have simply missed the numerous earlier stages in the developmental process. I probably just haven’t been looking in the right sites (such as, for example, the magazines of naturalists’ societies of the time).
Both the bell and house were meant for dispensing seed, with hempseed at that time the favorite, although the platforms of the latter could also provide fat, suet, and scraps of meat. Indeed, it was in the provisioning of a high-protein, high-fat supplementary diet that Baron von Berlespsch was at his most enterprising. His careful observations of the small birds of the German wood indicated that insect foods were vital, and his “Food-Tree” was an attempt to imitate a coniferous tree closely covered in insect eggs and larvae. This “appliance” was literally a small fir or spruce over which was ladled liberal amounts of a boiled mixture of the following: white bread (dried and ground), meat, hempseed, “maw” (I have been unable to confirm just what this is), poppy flour, white millet, oats, dried elderberries, sunflower seeds, and ant eggs, all combined in a large vat of beef or mutton fat. The instructions include copious advice on the best methods of heating, the need to employ two people for dispensing, and how to avoid scalding the tree while administering the hot mixture. Despite the “rank odors” emanating from this concoction, the educational benefits to pupils witnessing the eager feeding of many species meant, berated the baron, that all schools should install a Food-Tree on their grounds. Furthermore, householders without suitable trees were told they could simply add the same mixture to a length of wood with several bored holes: thus, the “Food-Stick.”
Should the procurement of the necessary ingredients prove difficult, or the production of the concoction too onerous, European followers of von Berlepsch’s methods could simply purchase the mixture in solid form from the firm of Hermann Scheid in Büren, Westphalia, under the commercial name of “Food-Stones.” Indeed, most of the specialized nest boxes and feeding appliances mentioned in the book were available from several named manufacturers in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Indeed, Martin Hiesemann gently chides von Berlepsch for his reluctance to pursue pat-ents for some of his inventions. In other words, by the early 1900s, a genuine and successful commercial industry based on wild bird feeding and the practical actions associated with bird protection were well entrenched in Germany at least. Numerous designs had been tested and production of several devices was under way. Furthermore, “Food-Stones” appear to be the first product specifically designed as wild bird food—as opposed to various seeds produced for other reasons—and available for sale. This had clearly occurred well before the appearance of How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds in 1908. It would appear that this date is indicative of the time that the information first became widely available to the English-speaking world. The significance of this publication to this version of history cannot be underestimated.
Demand for Advice
The arrival of this German book in the Anglosphere is significant as evidence of the growing interest internationally in natural history and nature preservation generally, and of practical applications such as bird feeding. People—at least those better educated and well-off—sought advice and direction. Above all, the main purpose of the work of von Berlepsch (and his effective scribe, Martin Hiesemann) was to promulgate a sensible guide to practical bird protection that was accessible to all. How to Attract continually reiterates the importance of hands-on, DIY solutions, providing all the plans, tips, and handyman guidance needed. The book’s suggestions were readily adopted and adapted on both sides of the Atlantic.46 We can state with some certainty that by the early decades of the twentieth century, the practice of wild bird feeding was becoming much more systematic and informed, although commercialization was still some way off.
In the United States, demand for practical natural-history information from the public
led to the production of a growing body of private and institutional publications on topics such as game management, waterway restoration, and raptor suppression. Of direct relevance is How to Attract Birds in Northeastern United States,47 Farmer’s Bulletin no. 621 published by the US Department of Agriculture in 1914. The author, W. L. McAtee, is notable for advocating feeding platforms designed to be weatherproof and waste-proof with roofs and side ledges, and was one of the earliest to suggest utilizing hopper feeders such as are widely used for domestic fowl and game birds to the present day. Similarly, Edward Howe Forbush’s widely cited 1918 work, Food, Feeding and Drinking Appliances and Nesting Material to Attract Birds,48 provides clear evidence of a growing interest in enhancing the effectiveness of a practice that was growing in popularity. Forbush (1858–1929) was a prolific and well-respected New England government scientist who was appointed state ornithologist in 1908, with the chief purview of investigating the habits of birds useful to mankind. Produced as a circular from the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture, his publication draws directly from von Berlepsch (including reproducing precisely the famous Food-Tree recipe) but had been written mainly with the New England region in mind. It is also much more expansive and instructive than the German book, describing a dozen “appliances” known to be effective as seed dispensers, feeding platforms, birdbaths, and squirrel and sparrow retardants. The emphasis is on self-constructed devices, however; although some are apparently commercial items (e.g., the feed hopper and the Weathervane Food House), Forbush infers that homemade is the norm. Similarly, when discussing foods to be deployed in feeders, only “mixed birdseed,” presumably sold for small cage birds, is mentioned. Rather, grains, seeds, nuts, and fruit that can be readily collected or even grown locally are recommended as practical for most people. Food intended for wild birds at this time was still sourced primarily from the domestic realm: cereals and stock foods, squash and pumpkin seeds, chicken eggs and eggshells, as well as by-products of the meat intended for human consumption—fat, rind, suet, lard, and marrow. Table scraps, of course, are mentioned, although white bread is regarded as a “poor food” (apparently the first time this issue is referred to). On the other hand, milk products such as cottage cheese and curds, are regarded as “excellent.”