Bird feeding
It has been estimated that American adults spend approximately US$3.8 billion a year on food, feeders and related accessories.
[2] Today in the United Kingdom, most people feed year-round, and enough food is provided to support the calorie requirements of the 10 most common garden bird species.
[4] In celebration of the bird feeding hobby, February was named National Bird-Feeding Month by congressional decree in 1994.
[citation needed] In winter, yellow-rumped and orange-crowned warblers, golden-crowned kinglets and northern flickers could visit.
[13] The use of bird feeders has been claimed to cause environmental problems; some of these were highlighted in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal.
[15] In this article, Rogers explains how the practice of feeding wild birds is inherently fraught with negative impacts and risks such as fostering dependency, altering natural distribution, density and migration patterns, interfering with ecological processes, causing malnutrition, facilitating the spread of disease and increasing the risk of death from cats, pesticides, hitting windows and other causes.
[16] An experimental study providing supplementary food during the breeding season found that predation levels by corvids and eastern gray squirrels were higher when nests were located in close proximity to filled feeders.
This was driven by smaller clutch sizes in both species and lower hatching success rates for blue tits.
[18] Studies by the University of Freiburg and Environment Canada found that blackcaps migrating to Great Britain from Germany had become adapted to eating food supplied by humans.
