Feeding wild animals can lead to trouble | Hacker News Reader

Feeding wild animals can lead to trouble

nationalgeographic.com

62 pointscodermobile49 comments

> how that’s effecting the composition

Affecting.

We have several squirrel resistant feeders for both seed and suet here in Raleigh NC and have not had a problem (afaik) with invasive birds. We also have hummingbird feeders, a vegetable garden, a peach tree and a blueberry bush, as well as bee and butterfly friendly plants.

It’s impossible to keep the squirrels away. Even though they can’t eat from the feeders directly, they constantly probe them for weaknesses, eat seed off the ground, steal from our peach tree, etc. They are really terrible pests. We also have trouble with rabbits eating our flowers and ground plants, but it’s a little harder to be upset by them. We have to surround our blueberry bush in bird netting but somehow a bird still seems to find its way in so we only get about half our bush’s blueberries.

We get robins, blue birds, cardinals, jays, mockingbirds, woodpeckers, grackles, finches, wrens, chickadees and others.

The hummingbirds are usually the most fun to watch. You can watch them bulk up from when they first arrive till they are ready to migrate. They are very aggressive with each other. Our feeder could easily feed four at a time but that never happens because as soon as one lands another tries to chase him or her off. If I’m sitting outside they’ll occasionally fly near to inspect me but they are very skittish. I’ve seen them fight with wasps that also like to land on the feeder.

The Carolina wrens will try to nest just about anywhere. One year I discovered one trying to make a nest in my bicycle helmet which was hanging in the garage. We have to be careful trimming bushes midsummer not to disturb any nests.

The plants and wildlife make our yard so much more pleasant and interesting. Our most recent addition is a solar powered fountain/bird bath to the two baths we already had. The birds really appreciate the baths in the summer time. Even the squirrels sometimes drink from them.

If I had to read a comment pointing out every misspelling on the internet, I just wouldn't use the internet at all. This type of comment adds very little value to other people.

I made the comment more interesting but to your point, this isn’t a spelling mistake, it’s a usage error. Affect/effect are different words which are sometimes confused. Usually “affect” is used as a verb and “effect” as a noun but affect has a noun form and effect has a verb form. They mean different things. Also, this isn’t just “on the Internet”—it’s published by National Geographic, a prestigious organization.

I’m a not a hard core prescriptivist but the writer in this case is simply wrong. It’s a mistake that should have been caught by an editor, though I doubt, sadly, any editor was involved.

It's an even more insidious error, because in some cases "effecting the composition" would be correct, e.g. when the subject is causing some thing or things to be composed.

Mastering the effect/affect distinction is a bit of a challenge, but may be dodged entirely by using neither, substituting "impact". Or "positive impact", "negative impact", "impactful" ...

Hence the runaway success of "impact" among speakers and writers who lack interest in making any such effort, such as politicians and designated "spokespersons" from organizations public and private.

Double-plus good, eh?

Double-plus good indeed

I like the impact of this newspeak

The verb form of "effect" just means "bring about" and it makes sense here.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/326/

Substitute “brings about” into the original sentence and you’ll see it doesn’t really make sense:

“It’s the first time really that we’ve seen this quite obvious, large-scale impact of what we’re doing in our own backyards and how that’s bringing about the composition of the birds that we see around us,” says Plummer.

Plummer meant that bird feeders are changing (i.e. affecting) the composition, not causing or bringing about (i.e. effecting) the composition.

Plummer recently published a paper on the topic that uses affect and effect many times and each use of affect is as a verb and effect as a noun:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10111-5

I’m certain the reporter made a transcription error while interviewing Plummer.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/326:_Effect_an_Ef... goes into more depth about the distinction.

Finally, I just double-checked with my mom who has a bachelors in English, a masters in TESOL, and a doctorate in rhetoric and linguistics, and who has worked as an English professor and as an English tutor. She agrees that “effecting” is misused in the original sentence. Feel free to cite a more authoritative source than my mom. :-)

How does that not make sense? Environmental factors bring about population compositions. That is exactly how an ecologist would think about it.

Please see the Nature article I linked to and note that every instance of "composition" refers to change in the composition. Some examples:

- "bird community composition also reacting promptly to the introduction and removal of feeding stations"

- "food resources provided by the British public have altered the composition"

- "feeding practices appear to have contributed significantly to the changing composition"

- "the composition of bird communities exploiting garden bird food has changed"

- "Changes in community composition"

The paper also contains 20+ uses of "effect" as a noun. Affected is clearly the intended word. The reporter made a mistake.

To "effect something" is to "cause it to occur" and in this case, bird feeding hasn't caused population composition to occur, but rather has changed the existing population composition.

BTW, I sent a DM to the reporter. I'll report back if he replies.

> I'll report back if he replies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20395196

> BTW, I sent a DM to the reporter. I'll report back if he replies.

The reporter never replied, but the article has been corrected:

    $ url=https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/07/dont-feed-wild-animals-except-birds/
    $ links -dump "$url" > current.txt
    $ links -dump "https://web.archive.org/web/20190705140555/$url" > archive.txt
    $ diff archive.txt current.txt
    134c134
    <    effecting the composition of the birds that we see around us,” says
    ---
    >    affecting the composition of the birds that we see around us,” says

"Foraging in the wild" there is practically no wild left in Germany. Some wolves came back and our politicians decided to issure hunting licenses for them... Not many points left for not feeding except for the transmission of deseases. That said, I've got a mealworm farm, and some bugs infiltrated it, so I'm putting those larvae out for the bird, but only one bird comes.

There are close to no birds at all around where you live in? Is this a city location or more rural? Either way, I cannot phantom it really.

there are some birds here, but mostly european sparrows, they don't fly high from the hedges, some black birds and ravens and the little yellow/grey bird that comes to me

> I've got a mealworm farm

Tell me more! This sounds interesting.

order some mealworms online, put them in a bucket with oatmeal,throw in kittchen scraps -> perfect pet, never dies off unless you drown 'em.

U can use them to enrich your standard meal with protein, they have a great ratio protein/fat and you can make keto treats out of them or use them to make treats for the dog. U can use them to feed your local fish, birds, hedgehogs, mice, rats.

They can be used to recycle certain types of plastic, and their composition doesn't change much. They usually don't like it moist(desert insects), but somehow they got in my terrarium and are thiving there.

I keep them around as another food source for times of starvation (kinda paranoid about crisis).

Fastest way of killing them is by drowning, they'll move forever in a microwave or frying pan.

They'll eat anything that contains moisture, preferably protein. I've fed them roadkill, eggshells(they scrape the inside of the shell and make it pretty brittle), other insects, all kinds of veggies, a few of them die when there's pesticides on the food - a good way to test your local veggies for them.

The only thing they won't touch is a cookie from McDonalds. If even the bugs avoid that we shouldn't prolly be eating that.

The larvae and pupae are edible, the bugs are yummy to birds, but I wouldn't try one, they smell bad when stressed. The bugs can fly and will if there's over population or not enough food. Bugs love protein as well, but seem to be doing fine just with cardboard and occasional water spraying.

Thanks! I have chickens, a small garden and two tanks growing spirulina, so I'm similarly geared towards turning my waste streams into sources of food and fuel. I was planning on getting some black soldier fly larvae to feed to the chickens, I may just try out meal worms instead as they are easier for me to source.

I wouldn't bother, just build Worm buckets where Flies can lay their eggs, larvae crawl out and feed the chickens

This is why I strongly disagree with the "don't feed 'wild' animals" movement at all. The animals are losing their regular sources of food because we're taking them away. Insect populations are way down, and this affects everyone upwards.

Feeding animals (appropriate food) can help people establish a relationship with animals, which has been something people have done since before history. It will bring you closer to nature and make you more environmentally conscious.

Why (the hell) would politicians issue hunting licenses, though it happens, with the same questions, here in north america? I never understood the explicit support of non-food-related hunting.

Easy, population control. Specifically with wolves and other hunting/pack animals, but really any imbalances can lead to major problems. Get enough of them and they'll consume the local wildlife and either starve or start looking for food in cities. Even animals that are fairly harmless such as Deer can be a threat though through wondering into roads.

While I'm no fan of 'sport' hunting, it does serve a purpose since we've already removed most of the big threats these animals would naturally face.

The idea is (in the cases I've researched it) that it supports dwindling populations of the wolves' prey. In some cases it actually makes sense, but not for any good reasons, so to speak. It's a bandaid solution. It's sort of like a top down solution to a regrettable ecological problem.

It's like when someone writes some terrible code and you write an external solution to one of the problems their code causes. Only in this case, instead of us doing a full rewrite, we need to leave nature alone and rewrite itself. Our intervening by culling predators is not sustainable because we can't properly calculate the effects and it has damaged predator populations so severely. We also didn't anticipate for example how diseased and disgusting deer would get without proper, natural, regular culling by their predators.

So yeah there are 'reasons' for doing it, but none of them are holistically wise choices for their respective ecosystems.

This quote jumped out at me.

"In a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications, Plummer found that people are seeing a more diverse array of bird species in backyards now than they did in the 1970s. And this change has coincided with the evolution of the birdfeeder market."

I wonder what effect this has had on insect populations. My immediate thought was better bird feeders and bird seed => more birds => fewer insects.

yep, thought that as well

Usually, lack of insects near humans is because humans destroy or remove their habitat and food - mainly decaying plant matter (fallen trees especially). Insect populations then dwindle, which means bird populations do also. If birds start to reappear because of backyard bird feeding, I bet the insects were already gone (or the birds wouldn't have disappeared in the first place)

My immediate thought was better bird feeders => birds don't need to eat insects => more insects. You're probably right though given that insect populations are indeed in decline.

The Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative has a nice fact sheet on back yard bird feeders and trichomonosis[1].

[1] http://www.cwhc-rcsf.ca/docs/fact_sheets/Trich_Factsheet_EN....

Except maybe birds. In a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications, Plummer found that people are seeing a more diverse array of bird species in backyards now than they did in the 1970s. And this change has coincided with the evolution of the birdfeeder market.

And insects.

Insects populations are declining world wide[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

I meant that we could plant things for insects to eat.

That’s the problem with short comments; it’s unclear which of several interpretations you meant.

Unfortunately, many people put out bird feeders that support the House Sparrow which is an invasive species in the U.S. that crowds out (and actively kills) local species.

https://nestwatch.org/learn/all-about-birdhouses/managing-ho...

https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-do-about-house-...

I am all for feeding birds as long as people research the bird feeders and food that they are providing.

Any sources for sparrows crowding out or killing local species? Last I heard they were mostly benign in the Americas.

http://www.treeswallowprojects.com/spardam.html

This made me sad.

http://sialis.org/hosp.htm

In the Texas Hill Country bluebirds used to be common. I'm not claiming that their decline is due to house sparrows, but it's clear that house sparrows can be quite harmful to many cavity-dwelling native birds. They can be extremely desrtuctive; it is not uncommon for them to kill both parents and offspring to take over a nest or nesting spot. One of many resources on the topic:

http://bluebirdnut.com/house-sparrows/

Interesting. House sparrows are native in the UK, and were extremely common here when I was a kid, but have been declining for decades to the point where they're now on the conservation red-list.

I'd like to attract birds of prey to eat all the rabbits, squirrels and other varmints that have been proliferating lately.

This logic is only fair if applied to homo sapiens sapiens animals, too. They aren't any less clever at being short-term efficient at their own long-term peril and any careful observer of California can tell you of the growing threat they pose as carriers of diseases "spread by exposure to urine, saliva, and feces".

In my Bay Area neighborhood, residents have been feeding coyotes by letting their cats run loose outside. Then when the coyotes eat the cats, those idiots get mad because Santa Clara County Vector Control won't do something to remove the coyotes.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/vector/programs-and-services/wi...

How are they “feeding coyotes by letting their cats run loose”?

It's like you were giving them live bait.

Cause cats running loose is a terrible problem itself. They are small mammals dedicated to the art of murder. They tend to wipe out native species.

Yep - if you care about your cat and you care about your environment then keep you cats indoors

It was what earth persons call “humor”

Cats are coyote food.

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