It's a topic that comes up quite often so I thought this recent post from Cornell might be of interest. It's obviously American oriented, but there are still a lot of relevant bits for us (e.g .hygiene, predators).
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/why-do-we ... e-experts/
Feeding wild birds
-
Neil Fitzgerald
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3645
- Joined: Mon May 18, 2009 10:20 am
- Location: Hamilton, New Zealand
- Contact:
-
zarkov
- Posts: 653
- Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:54 pm
- Location: Torbay.
Re: Feeding wild birds
Good post, it's the reason I only feed specific species in the winter.
Random bird feeding is a big nuisance where I live on the North Shore, Auckland. People feed bread to birds for the best of motives, but the pigeon and duck populations are going through the roof, and local parks, ponds etc are being polluted by the practice.
There's an ethnic element to feeding birds here and I'm sympathetic to that, but what works elsewhere doesn't always end so happily in NZ.
We never had a pigeon problem till recently, but culls are on the horizon imo.
Random bird feeding is a big nuisance where I live on the North Shore, Auckland. People feed bread to birds for the best of motives, but the pigeon and duck populations are going through the roof, and local parks, ponds etc are being polluted by the practice.
There's an ethnic element to feeding birds here and I'm sympathetic to that, but what works elsewhere doesn't always end so happily in NZ.
We never had a pigeon problem till recently, but culls are on the horizon imo.