As our enthusiasm for feeding garden birds grew, those with time and money went further. By the early 1980s, when birdman and broadcaster Tony Soper was making his series Discovering Birds for the BBC, there was a whole host of ingenious recipes for feeding the birds. Tony himself demonstrated one of these – a kind of pudding made from high-energy ingredients – on the programme. As he now recalls, he did so in the tongue-in-cheek style of one of the pioneering TV chefs, the ‘Galloping Gourmet’ Graham Kerr: ‘People liked the idea of cooking for birds, so if you did one of these cod recipes, with fat of some kind, and seeds, of course that’s very attractive to the birds.’
But with increasing demands on their time, fewer and fewer people were cooking for themselves, let alone for the birds. Instead, they turned to a convenient, shop-bought alternative – peanuts in a red net bag. These were low-grade nuts, which had been deemed unfit for human consumption. Although they were potentially nutritious for birds, they had a drawback nobody knew about, as ornithologist Chris Whittles remembers: ‘The problem with peanuts used to be that a large proportion of them coming into the birdfood trade were toxic, contaminated with aflatoxin, which is a breakdown product of a mould.’
And as Chris Whittles now recalls with wry embarrassment, when birds ate the contaminated peanuts, they were slowly poisoned: ‘This used to happen even in my own garden, because I used to feed through to May, and then there would be no birds left. And knowing where I got the peanuts at the time, and knowing what I now know, by that point I’d managed to kill off all the Greenfinches in the garden!’
Ironically, Chris Whittles was one of the first people to realise the seriousness and extent of the problem, and when he set up his own bird-food business, CJ Wildbird Foods, he took great care to source his peanuts so that they did not contain the poison.
He was also, along with a handful of other pioneers, one of those who during the 1970s and 1980s began to innovate, developing high-quality products designed to mimic the food eaten by wild birds, including sunflower seeds and hearts, nyger seed (particularly loved by Goldfinches) and a wide range of fat-based products.
Indeed for the Goldfinch, one of the most beautiful of our garden birds, these new products led to a change in the species’ fortunes. After a sharp decline from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Goldfinch population has bounced back rapidly. This is largely thanks to the widespread provision of high-energy seeds, and flocks of these colourful birds are now a very common sight on garden bird feeders. Its close relative the Siskin – a small, streaky finch with green, yellow and black plumage – has also benefitted from a rise in garden bird feeding, enabling it to extend its range southwards from Scotland into southern Britain. Today the Siskin is a relatively frequent visitor to many gardens, especially in late winter and early spring when supplies of natural food are at their lowest.
Other unusual species also came into our gardens, many for the first time, attracted by these increasingly sophisticated foods that quickly and efficiently deliver the energy the birds need. Today, well over one hundred different kinds of bird have been recorded coming to bird tables and feeders. Whereas we once only saw sparrows, Starlings, tits and finches, by the early twenty-first century, garden birdwatchers were enjoying such unexpected visitors as Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, Blackcaps and Long-tailed Tits.
The new products, stacked on supermarket shelves in bright, colourful wrappers, also proved irresistible to bird-loving shoppers. Chris Baines regards this as simply another aspect of the growing consumerism of the late twentieth century:
It’s quite striking to look at how the packaging and the convenience of birdfood has tracked the way in which we’ve changed our own eating habits. The rise and rise of prepared meals in Marks & Spencer’s is echoed by being able to buy the ‘fat bar’ – none of this getting fat from the butcher and melting it down and mixing it with peanuts and things – it’s all there in a plastic package!
Today, feeding birds is yet another way in which we express ourselves as consumers, and even practise the art of one-upmanship, according to David Lindo:
I think a lot of people deep down do feed birds for selfish reasons – but in a good way. They want to say ‘in my garden I get this, that and the other – I get Bullfinches, Chaffinches… I’ve got a great garden for birds – what have you got?!’ There is that competitive edge, but that’s fine, because it’s benefitting the birds, whichever way you look at it, and it’s bringing nature closer to that person as well.
It is this deeper need to reconnect with nature that underpins our nation’s vast expenditure on bird food – at least £150 million pounds a year. However, Mark Cocker sees this not just as an expression of our consumer society, but as another way in which we make links between ourselves and the natural world:
Day after day people provide food for the birds, and extraordinary relationships of trust are built up. I think it’s our chance to step outside the fate of our species, which is a terrible one – I mean who wants to be feared by every other creature?! And that simple, Franciscan act of giving to birds makes us feel good about life, and redeems us in some fundamental way.
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Our urge to reconnect with nature through the birds in our gardens is nonetheless tempered by the fact that the garden itself is an artificial, semi-domesticated space, created by us. Jeremy Mynott is concerned that by feeding garden birds, we may be in danger of turning them into little more than ‘wild pets’: ‘I think the wish to feed garden birds is part of a larger emotional wish to somehow make the birds dependent on us, and control the birds as part of our environment – to “decorate” the environment with birds.’
The desire for control over wild nature has always been part and parcel of gardening. We’ve always favoured some plants at the expense of others, and waged war on those we consider to be weeds. And in recent years the popularity of television gardening makeover programmes such as Ground Force has led us to regard the garden not as outside of, and separate from, our home, but as part of it – effectively an extra room.
Now, having invested time and money bringing birds into this space, we may subconsciously want to control them too – we want them to behave in ways that conform to our own moral codes. This can throw up both practical and emotional issues, as Helen Macdonald points out: ‘If you put a bird table in your garden, you are creating a Sparrowhawk feeding station. It’s really quite funny and distressing to realise that when a Sparrowhawk flies along the backs of suburban gardens it’s just taking advantage of the wonderful feeding opportunities people have created for it.’
When this ruthless predator does pay a visit, Helen Macdonald understands people’s emotional response:
People get very upset about Sparrowhawks, for example, because they see their garden as an extension of their living-space. So when you look out of the window and you see a Sparrowhawk pulling a Blackbird or a pigeon to pieces on your patio, it’s kind of “murder on the living-room floor”. And this is why some birds are described as being mean, or evil, or villainous, because they become part of the human world.
And as Bill Oddie notes, the arrival of uninvited predators into our gardens throws into sharp relief the emotional ties we develop with the birds we feed: ‘If you’ve got used to “your” Blue Tits, and some great big predator goes whizzing through, and basically takes that away, I think inside you’re going “Aaagh! That’s mine!” And you know you’ve lost something.’
As a result, many of us have begun to divide garden birds into two camps: on one side, our friends, and on the other, our enemies, according to Jeremy Mynott:
We project human values onto the birds, and then admire them or dislike them for those. We like the Robin because it is tame and confiding – or so it appears, in fact it’s the merest cupboard love – we dislike Magpies and Starlings because we think they are noisy, rackety birds, vulgar and aggressive. These are all human characteristics.
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