Backyard Bird Basics: Native Plants for Birds Webinar 

Thank you everyone!

Providing native plants for garden birds is a step in the right direction for making backyard birding a safer hobby for wild birds. Most, if not all bird feeders available on the open market harbor bacteria-laced droppings on their surfaces IN BETWEEN CLEANINGS that birds visiting these feeders can be exposed to. When wild birds are exposed to droppings contaminated with salmonella bacteria, it can lead to the spread of salmonellosis in flocks and larger populations flocks belong to as the disease can easily spread from bird to bird. Just look at the devastation to Pine Siskin populations over the winter of 2020-2021 where salmonellosis spread like wildfire from the Carolinas all the way to the western US. And, the likely culprit that caused the spread of the disease was exposure for these affected Pine Siskins to salmonella-contaminated droppings on bird feeders. The avian disease can also be spread when garden birds ingest salmonella-contaminated bird seed. The spread of salmonellosis in garden birds is always a threat to their well-being. It was an irruptive migration for Pine Siskins last winter, so that just made the threat of the spread of the disease exponentially worse. Keeping feeders periodically clean and sanitized is certainly good advice for maintenance, but there are no inherent qualities in any recommended bleach solution that magically zap the bacteria out of droppings deposited on feeders that birds will be exposed to IN BETWEEN CLEANINGS. Also, one issue that never gets much attention from backyard birding "experts" is the fact that millions of households in the US that participate in backyard birding don't bother with feeder maintenance, at all. Like it, or not, garden birds in neighborhoods all across the US are exposed to well-maintained feeders and poorly-maintained, dropping-covered, bacteria-laced feeders. So, how about some honesty where the hobby is concerned, and occasionally admit that garden birds are exposed to both of these conditions year-round with regard to how sanitary bird feeders are that are provided to them. Backyard birding is a man-made hobby with too much avian disease-causing error built in, and feeders that harbor droppings IN BETWEEN CLEANINGS that are absolute vectors for the spread of avian diseases like salmonellosis are a big part of the problem. And, in defense of backyard birders how are they to provide consistently sanitary feeders for their garden birds when the vast majority of the ones available to them on the open market harbor droppings IN BETWEEN CLEANINGS, and are designed and crafted to be inferior in a sanitary sense. Please name another wild creature we nurse along like we do with wild birds. Human intervention is usually discouraged when it comes to feeding wildlife, but somehow we issue a pass when it comes to supplemental feeding of wild birds. Feeding wildlife is typically discouraged because it can cause animals of different species to gather in a concentrated area which opens the door for them to spread diseases to each other across species. But, this is exactly what happens with backyard birding when birds gather in mass at feeders and intermingle across species as they never would in the wild, which can open the door for them to spread diseases to each other across species. I saw a story recently on youtube about Northern Cardinals with Conjunctivitis like house finches are so plagued with. Maybe they contracted it when they intermingled across species at a bird feeder, unlike how they wouldn't intermingle across species in the wild.

Thank you so much for this. Not only for the content but also that you made it available. The afternoon it was on zoom I was unable to attend.