Reply to Please feed the birds! They have young ones and are hungry and tired. IF you love birds enter here..

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Please feed the birds! They have young ones and are hungry and tired. IF you love birds enter here.."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Abstract:
Among the most popular reasons that people feed wild birds is that they want to help birds. The extent to which supplemental food helps birds, however, is not well established. From spring 2011 to spring 2014, we examined how feeding of wild birds influences the health of individual birds at forested sites in central Illinois, USA. Specifically, we compared three forested sites where we provided supplemental food with three forested sites for which no supplemental food was available and monitored changes in the individual health of birds. In addition, we determined whether any changes in bird health had occurred after feeders had been removed from sites 10 months before. Generally, the individual health of birds improved with supplemental feeding, including increased antioxidant levels, reduced stress (heterophil-to-lymphocyte ratio) and more rapid feather growth. In some species, we also found improved body condition index scores and innate immune defense. The difference among sites was not present 10 months after feeders were removed, suggesting that the impact on health was indeed related to supplemental feeding. Potential negative effects of supplemental feeding were also found, including an increase in infectious disease prevalence among individual birds at forested sites where supplemental food was offered. Birds with clear signs of pathology showed deficits in most of the physiological metrics in which birds at feeder sites typically showed improved health condition. At the peak of prevalence of infectious disease, 8.3% of all birds at feeders exhibited symptoms of conjunctivitis, pox, dermal disease or cloacal disease. We found both positive and negative impacts of wild bird feeding, and that, in general, birds that had access to supplemental food were in better physiological condition. Moreover, the negative effects we found may be mitigated by hobbyists engaging in safer bird-feeding practices.

Final paragraph:
This study is the first to examine the effects of wild bird feeding on the individual health of a broad range of species across multiple seasons and years. We conclude that birds that use feeders are typically healthier than birds without access to feeders, with the exception of higher disease prevalence rate at feeder sites. In addition, our physiological data suggest that the removal of feeders after they are well established does not lead to a crash in the health state, and as such, feeders appear genuinely to be supplemental and do not create dependency among free-living birds in our area. Studies such as ours can be used to develop evidence-based recommendations that can lead to a better bird-feeding experience for both the people who feed birds and the wild birds themselves.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4778448/ [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics