Bird Feeders

nature article Earl Plato
We heard Jerry Farrell at the Bert Miller Nature Club Club Meeting some years ago.. Jerry from Western New York is a dynamic speaker. He bands birds and loves them. He has goldfinches at his feeders all year long. Yes, to him niger seed is the answer. But don’t look for the familiar breeding colours- black and yellow in wintertime. You may have goldfinches at your feeder and not know it. Sparrow-sized they change their colours from bright to drab. Here is part of an article I wrote from 2000.
I am no longer the bird feeding person I once was! Not that I want to slip to lower levels but that’s reality when you move from farm to town. Fewer wild birds, fewer opportunities to feed. This article is an historical one about bird feeding and its beginnings as told by nature writer, John Dennis and myself.
It is only recently that bird feeding has achieved its overwhelming popularity here and the USA When was songbird feeding begun? Dennis and I agree that Henry David Thoreau around 1845 recorded some of his activities at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. I was at Walden Pond in 1954 before the building boom began. I’ve returned twice and now you can not recognize the place and his rustic cabin because of the surrounding buildup. I have a Thoreau book and we read that over 150 years ago Thoreau was offering corn and bread crumbs to the birds at Walden Pond. He was feeding the birds at his beautiful, rustic setting. Read Walden Pond if you haven’t already. This philosopher loved nature and wanted to help the local songbirds. He is the first recorded bird feeder as far as I know. There were no handmade feeders as we know. Thoreau’s fellow naturalist and author John Burroughs toward the end of the 1800’s tells of feeding birds regularly at his woodland cabin. Again it seems a matter of scattering seeds and crumbs on the ground.
By 1910 Dennis tells us that there were many references to bird feeding, including two books on bird feeding: Methods of Attracting Birds, by Gilbert H. Trafton and Wild Bird Guests (1915) by Ernest H. Baynes. Three more informative books were also written at this time. Interest was growing. We learn that food was often offered in crude but practical homemade feeders. Less scattering of seed on the ground.
There is even a reference to a young Californian woman in the early 1900’s while convalescing from an illness sprinkled some sugar water on some flowers. Soon she had attracted hummingbirds. We learn that shortly after a Caroline Soule of Brookline, Massachusetts provided hummingbirds with the first sugar-water feeder.
Philanthropist B.F. Tucker began in 1926 to sell hummingbird feeders. They sold well.
Another feeder that became a commercial success was invented in 1930. You know it well. I have had two of them up. Peter Kalham gave us the first modern tubular hanging feeder. John Dennis says, These were the humble beginnings of a hobby that is now among the most popular in North America.
Feed the songbirds this winter but take note: Once you start be faithful, don’t stop!