by Darryl Jones
Forbush concludes his work with a dossier of foods preferred by almost fifty species, indicating the collation of a considerable amount of personal experimentation and a wide network of correspondents. He is also an early (perhaps the earliest on record) advocate for year-round feeding, suggesting that any site successfully attracting birds should be supplied continuously so “that [the birds] may find it at all times in case of sudden scarcity.”49
Clearly, interest was growing, the demand for advice and assistance building quietly. Partly in reaction to the despoiling of the countryside by unrestrained industrialization, as well as a renewed appreciation of scenic landscapes, many people were beginning to express what we would probably now call “environmental consciousness,” supporting the nascent national parks movement,50 and calling for the preservation of birds, at least those regarded as pleasant and useful. The decades around the turn of the twentieth century witnessed unprecedented levels of political activity by well-organized groups of citizens coming together to promote and agitate for action. This was the context behind the founding of some of the largest and most successful environmental and conservation organizations still active today: the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (1889), Sierra Club (1892), and the National Audubon Society (1905). These collectives resulted in declaration of the world’s first national parks (Yellowstone in 1872 and Royal in Australia soon after in 1879) and eventually the first of many bird reserves in the UK.51 Support for these activities was widespread, suggesting increasing attention to environmental issues, both local and national. It is likely that these were the people starting to feed birds, regularly and intentionally, at home. This was the embryonic market for wild bird feeding products.
The Products
We know from the Germans that some commercial items—nest boxes, seed dispensers, and even specialized bird food products (e.g., “Food-Stones”)— were available for sale in some places in central Europe by the 1890s, although how many were sold is difficult to ascertain. By 1910, the magazine Punch52 described wild bird feeding as a national pastime in Britain, and included several advertisements for mail-order feeders—though not yet seed. In 1913, possibly the first advertisement for feeding devices in North America appears in Bird-Lore53 (November–December issue), highlighting the Dobson Automatic Sheltered Feeding Table. In what was certainly cutting-edge design for the time, this feeder—according to the ad—moved in the breeze like a weather vane, ensuring that the birds within were always sheltered. In an early combination of commercialization, conservation, and emotional marketing (“Do You Love Birds? Help Save Them”)—something that will become increasingly familiar—this device was designed by, and available directly from, Joseph Dobson the director of the Illinois Audubon Society. It would be fascinating to know how many were sold.
From this point on, a steady range of feeding-related apparatus appear for sale in appropriate publications.54 Nonetheless, it appears that the growing numbers of people engaged in feeding birds were doing so without too many purchased items. But bird feeding, still overwhelmingly a winter activity, was moving beyond the farm and backyard. During the 1920s, community bird-feeding programs began to emerge, typically run by schools, Boy Scouts groups, and local Audubon chapters. These programs organized groups of participants to stock feeding stations established in public parks during the winter, usually using suet. For example, in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1921, it was reported that two dozen people “by precept and example” had established winter feeding stations “to cover every section of town.”55
In 1935, in the United States, the Northeast experienced a series of extreme winter storms, leading to a media-led campaign promoting the feeding of birds in a fashion reminiscent of the Great Blizzard of 1890–1891 in England. The pioneering bird guide author Roger Tory Peterson recalled how announcers on radio stations throughout the region implored people to feed the birds while ice covered the ground.56 “For days scarcely a program on the air did not include an announcement about this. Everybody fed birds, from the fire escapes of New York City to isolated snowed-in farms in the back country.” Peterson’s revolutionary Field Guide to the Birds57 had appeared only the year before (in 1934), arguably the single most important event in the history of bird watching. For the first time, ordinary people had a truly portable, easy to use, and comprehensive means of identifying the birds they encountered. Unquestionably, attracting birds to a feeder where they could be clearly viewed increased interest in feeding, which further facilitated observation and identification: a classic positive feedback mechanism. Peterson was acutely aware of this link, and from his earliest writings, actively promoted birding through feeding.
It was during the 1950s that the scene changed dramatically. In the United States, numerous seed companies, providing largely grain in bulk to the poultry and cage bird industries, slowly began introducing products packaged specifically for wild birds. The Kellogg Seed Company, for instance, which had been selling birdseed since 1918, began selling a seed mix based on choice experiments conducted by the National Audubon Society.58 La-beled “Audubon Society Mixture,” the launch of this product in 1953 was just the first of an endless series of collaborations between producers and environmental organizations. From this moment on, the line between science, conservation, marketing, and recreation becomes impossibly blurred.
A couple of entrepreneurial seed companies stand out during this crucial period of the 1950s. Knauf and Tesch (eventually to become Kaytee Co.) and Wagner Brothers Feed Corp., although competitors, collaborated effectively in developing the first mass-produced “birdseed” to be sold nationally through grocery stores. Blending ideally with postwar prosperity and modern expectations of convenience and availability, the transparent polypropylene 5- and 10-pound bags transformed the practice of feeding birds in the backyards of North America. Knauf and Tesch’s first bags of wild bird food appeared in 1955, and Wagner’s a year later. The latter also had another twist: a brand radically called “Four Seasons.”59 This product was effectively the first real shot in the “winter versus year-round” altercation. Similarly, across the Atlantic, a significant step in the enhance-ment of feeding occurred in 1958 with the arrival of the small, neat boxes of Swoop Wild Bird Food60 (for 25 pence). A marketing triumph of the time, these convenient containers could be purchased in pet stores and department stores throughout the country, avoiding the usual untidiness of buying your seed in bulk. The era of convenience packaging, with its attendant marketing opportunities, had also arrived in Britain.
But seed needs a feeder, and along with the expansion of offerings, the variety of US devices available for sale also increased. Simple homemade platforms began to be replaced by imaginative and attractive feeder designs, ideal as accessories for the modern garden or backyard in the sprawling suburban landscape. Duncraft, for example, founded in 1952, produced a windowsill feeder, first of Masonite, then in 1958, the “Flight Deck,” made out of plastic.61
Not withstanding von Berlepsch’s futuristic Food-Bell appliance, it is fair to say that until the late 1960s, most wild bird foods were being presented on flat surfaces such as platform feeders, with or without roofs, or simply spread on the ground. Despite the obvious issues of spoiled food, hygiene, squirrel depredations, and the continuous requirement of replen-ishment, most people would simply have accepted these as avoidable and inevitable. Enter some humorous Yankees and their contender for most significant exhibit in this history of bird feeding.
Believe it or not, the now-iconic company Droll Yankees, started life in 1960 as a Rhode Island record company dedicated, in the words of found-ers Peter Kilham and Alan Bemis, to “preserving the off-color humor and tales of Old New England.”62 Whatever the success of this venture, Kilham, a keen amateur birder who was also a trained engineer, began experiment-ing with alternative approaches to the delivery of seed. His triumph, the original tubular bird feeder (technically, model A-6F, but often regarded as the hanging tube feeder) was introduced to the public in
1969. Instantly, or so it seemed, the perennial issues of mess, waste, and efficiency were largely solved. This new vertical perspective also suited the emerging opportunities associated with the arrival of new seed varieties and the move to targeted feeding. The new tube design allowed far more control over access to the seeds through careful sizing and positioning of the feeding holes. The other feeder designs did not disappear, of course, but the tube feeder was one of those “instant hits,” selling in huge numbers, and was a catalyst for experimentation in feeder design that has continued ever since.
The Seeds
The gravity-powered tube design was ideally suited to the relatively large and smooth gray-striped sunflower seeds that had become the predominant commercial bird food at the time. Prior to the 1930s, when sunflowers were first tentatively offered for sale as wild bird food, most of the seeds used were those readily available for agriculture, livestock farming, or the poultry industry. Wheat, corn, hemp, millet, sorghum, and peanuts were the regular feeder fare, although we need to appreciate that suet and animal fat had always been typical winter offerings. Sunflower seed was part of the mix, but its popularity was based largely on availability, and that grew steadily following the Second World War.
The story of the development of sunflowers from a plant cultivated for millennia on the American Great Plains, through export to Europe in the 1500s, its utilization by Russian peasants from the 1860s, the return of the plant to North America via Russian Mennonites shortly thereafter, and the remarkable scientific research in both the United States and the Soviet Union deserves an entire book in itself (although it is nicely summarized in Feeding Wild Birds in America).63 For our present purposes, however, we can cut to the key events that resulted in the growth of the sunflower industry that led to the availability of sunflower seeds for feeding birds. In short, it’s all about oil.
The indigenous peoples of the Great Plains had exploited the rich although tiny seeds of the native sunflower plants for millennia, using them for food, oil, medicine, and ceremony. Crucially, these insightful people engaged in remarkable selective breeding, eventually increasing the size of the seeds 1000-fold.64 These were the plants “discovered” by the Spanish in the 1500s. Soon they were widely grown in suitable areas of Europe. Having evolved in a hard, arid environment, the plant was naturally drought resistant, a feature that certainly saved many lives among the Russian people who cultivated it extensively throughout the harsh interior of their country. The relatively high edible oil content of the plant’s seeds attracted the attention of the Soviet agronomist V. S. Pustovoit (1886– 1972). Between 1924 and the 1960s, through careful breeding experiments, Pustovoit was able to increase the oil content from approximately 20% to 40%, an outstanding and unprecedented achievement. In terms of improving the efficiency of a crop—the outputs of useable material compared to the inputs of water and fertilizer—these were spectacular results. For advancing the welfare of the Soviet people Pustovoit was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Red Banner of Labor.65
These developments were being noted from afar, especially in the oilseed industry back in the United States. Despite the Cold War climate of the 1960s, the agricultural company Cargill was granted permission for their agronomist Dick Baldwin to visit several research stations in the Soviet Union to learn more about these important developments. During this 1966 tour, Baldwin met Pustovoit (then aged eighty) and having seen the much anticipated 40% oilseed, he was dumbfounded to be shown a package containing the latest batch of sunflower seeds with a new bench-mark: 46% oil. The Soviets may have been winning the Space Race at the time, but for Baldwin, this was even more important. The story goes that Baldwin asked if he might keep the package of precious all-black sunflower seeds.66 Knowing that such a request would most certainly be declined by the minister for agriculture, his Soviet host handed the seed to Baldwin’s local interpreter to be enjoyed as a snack. We can only imagine Baldwin’s silent torment as he watched the priceless specimens being consumed before his eyes, and then his bewilderment when the interpreter quietly handed him the remaining 100-odd seeds during the car trip to the next stop on the itinerary. Those now legendary Soviet sunflowers somehow made it back to the Cargill base in Fargo, North Dakota, where they formed the genetic basis of a huge increase in oilseed production during the 1970s. Despite the apparent potential for starting an international in-cident during nervous times, the event appears to have fostered a rare and beneficial collaboration between US and Soviet scientists, with many subsequent trade and research visits. This region in eastern Europe remains at the heart of the global sunflower supply: in 2012, sunflower production in Ukraine and Russia together accounted for 44% of the 37 million tons produced worldwide, with the United States providing 1.26 million tons.67
Hence, the significance of the black sunflower to our story. Although developed primarily for high levels of edible oils, compared to the traditional striped variety, black sunflowers have larger, “meatier” kernels, more protein, and, most important, much thinner husks. In other words, this was a bonanza of high-protein, easily opened seeds for a suite of the smaller species—titmice, chickadees, finches—while all the larger species also found them even easier to consume. The arrival of these sleek black seeds during the 1970s was most certainly a key event in the history of bird feeding.68 And that is a claim best backed up by the birds themselves: they came in droves, providing the best possible reason for the consumer (this time, the humans with money) to return eagerly to the stores for more of the same.
Black sunflowers were not simply favored by birds at feeders. My mar-ginal role in the saga of this seed was as a young researcher attempting to understand why so many birds were flocking to what was a relatively new crop for the dry interior of eastern Australia. This was the early 1980s and my first real job since graduating with a degree in wildlife management; it was to be a transformative experience. To see flocks of over 10,000 parrots (mainly huge Sulphur-crested Cockatoos and Galahs as well as Cockatiels) and pigeons, finches, and sparrows descending on those vivid yellow fields was an astonishing sight. Why were they concentrating on sunflowers when other feeding resources were abundant nearby? My eventual, somewhat useless conclusion, was that nothing—including all their natural foods—was as attractive to a dozen species of granivorous birds as a field of almost ripe black sunflowers.69 This was not particularly welcome news for the Oilseeds Board, who had funded the work, or the farmers growing the crop. Nor would it be the last time I failed to come up with a solution to a problem. But, mysteriously, it did set me on a path toward behavioral ecology: understanding how the behavior of animals is influenced by their environment. And food is always fundamental to this.
So the advent of black sunflowers was a major event. Around the same time, an entirely new type of seed appeared on the scene, niger (Guizotia abyssinica), another oil-rich grain used traditionally as cooking oil in eastern Africa and southern Asia. In the United States, this seed was renamed “Nyjer” in 199870—ostensibly to clarify its pronunciation—and registered as a trademark of the Wild Bird Feeding Industry. It is also, inac-curately, known as “thistle.” This seed was much smaller and lighter than most of the other seeds available during the 1960s, but its arrival coincided nicely with the lift in experimentation in feeder design. Very quickly, nyger-specific feeders became available, including small stick-on window units and purpose-designed tube feeders with appropriately smaller access holes. The new seed was, like the black sunflower, almost instantly successful, and for essentially the same reasons: this new food attracted a different group of species. This included Pine Siskins, Goldfinches, Dunnocks, and redpolls, species with strong but slender bills that can extract the seeds while the sparrows and larger species cannot.
The Choice
The message was becoming steadily clearer: to attract more species, de-ploy a wider variety of foods in as many ways as possible. Clearly, this was a market opening up to more choice, and the number and variety of seed mixes began to explod
e. But so did the cheap options. Modestly priced bags of attractively colorful blends of exotic-looking grain appeared in every shopping center and garden store, and were purchased in great amounts by the growing numbers of people interested in feeding and watching birds at home. We have all been there at some stage I’m sure; a big cheap bag of oats, rock-hard sorghum (milo), cracked corn, wheat, and what looks a lot like small stones. Apart from some House Sparrows and a desperate feral pigeon, many species that arrive to inspect a feeder of this stuff typically leave after little more than a taste. It’s both disappointing and almost belittling to be rejected by your own birds. Although this experience is all too familiar to feeders today, general knowledge concerning the preferences of species for the various foods was hard to come by and often limited to specific areas. Most people simply purchased whatever was available locally and hoped for the best. Often this resulted in the feeding of species most people don’t really want to encourage: sparrows, starlings, grackles, magpies, and the like. At a time when the variety of foods and feeders available allowed people to target particular species, what was needed was reliable information on which species liked what.
While other preference studies (including by the British Trust for Ornithology)71 had been undertaken around this time in the late 1970s, the most significant were a series conducted by Dr. Aelred Geis for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Starting with the study undertaken in Maryland entitled Relative Attractiveness of Different Foods at Wild Bird Feeders72 (published in 1980), this research report was influential well beyond its limited geographical scope, generating considerable debate and a plethora of similar trials. During 1980–1985 Geis continued to test seed preferences, arranging volunteers to record the comings and goings of birds to carefully designed feeders in Maine, Ohio, and California, as well as Maryland. This was pioneering “citizen science” on a fairly grand scale, long before the concept was first formalized. Geis was able to base his findings on solid data with his observers logging over 700,000 visits. Although his results would be regarded as fairly obvious by today’s collective knowledge, these were the first preference studies actually based on sound choice experimental methodology. Using two seeds already known to be attractive to a lot of species—black-striped sunflower and white provo millet—as the standard, Geis tried fifteen different types of seed and an additional six variants of sunflower, presented to his discriminating clients (the birds) in randomly positioned lots of four. As well as the obvious—wheat, corn, milo, and oats were distinctly less popular to most species—Geis demonstrated that many species preferred the same seeds in different parts of the country. He also confirmed the all-round attractiveness of black sunflowers but concluded that the best strategy was to mix it up: plenty of variety and a mixture of presentations, platforms, hangers, and straight onto the ground. The number of seed companies was burgeoning, and those paying close attention to this research were soon modifying their offerings. Many major marketing and production decisions and the composition of seed blends developed during the 1980s resulted from the Geis work.