NATIVE, Wild ANIMALS and WILD BIRDS  

Well I certainly leave out food for the wild birds that visit our garden, and many people in our neighbourhood do also.

We also have hedgehogs living in our garden and I leave some food out for them at night too, as they are nocturnal. I visited both the NSPCB (national society for the protection of birds) and a similar site for hedgehogs I recently found, and both these sites encourage the public how and when to leave out food for these animals to support them without creating an over-reliance. In deep winter here in the U.K. is the time when they need our support most.

The birds with food, and the hedgehogs with nests that won't be disturbed where they can hibernate. - Derek

There are no wild animals around my house to feed, thank heavens.

I do feed the birds, hummingbirds, and squirrels. If anything else comes onto the property, then i figure it will find the food. Otherwise, i don't really feed wild animals. I have several bird feeders out though.

The dilemna of feeding or not feed native, wild animals can easily be solved. You can put out foods closer to what the animals will find in the wild, in areas where you can watch them and they feel secure. Not every day, or they do become dependant on you for the food. And yes, you can hand feed some birds without them becoming to reliant- magpies, butcher birds and currawongs are the best for this.

Another way is to set up your gardens (or balcony) with lots of native plants, a water feature and plenty of places for animals to hide in. The idea being, you create a natural habitat that requires little maintenance and encourages the local wildlife in.

Using both options increases the chances of having animals come to visit, and is quite fun.

Being an animal lover myself, I have found it hard to not feed the begging birds, but I don't always have food around that is appropriate for them, and I know that I'm not always going to be here to feed them, so I limit what I put out. I am working on putting lots of native plants into my garden so that they can come and go at will, and have plenty of natural foods to eat. Also means, I might have some natural wood perches for my cockatiels too, in a couple of years.

I know you've worried about some new habits would come to make some changes on wildlife,Yeah? It seems not to be more pessimistic about this,actually,lots of seeds are spread by them,as a factor,it's never been changed from now to then,but the situation is bit complicated

1.Change of paces would be changed by feeding.They don't want to search foods from one place to another because there exist ready-made food they are likely to eat and enjoy it.Migration will be stopped

2.The food we feed them is man made and they will become hatchlings without original nature.Once they are conditioned to the food we offer to,once they leave them some day,the food is not continuable,in addition,they don't need our foods at all from the begining,too often we just tickle ourselves

As a phenomenon,bird-feeding is a bit popular.Birdseeds may be made some potenial downside,although a lot of impact has not been proven

Anyway,We should go easy with it

If you fed them every day, I would say you would be doing them a disservice but an occasional "topping off" does no harm in my opinion. I do the same thing myself! The world isn't as it once was, food isn't as plentiful in the wild thanks to the encroachment of humans.

I feed the birds all winter, which is unnatural. But I love watching them, that's my entertainment. I feed hummingbirds in the summer--rather, I have a feeder up and the bees and butterflies drink from it, no hummingbirds yet. Every so often I'll throw something over the fence for the white possum that hangs out in this neighborhood, too.

Hi,my wife being a Buddhist, we do this when we can. Something about good karma from what she has explained to me.

In Thailand (my wife's home country), there is a common practice of going to a river, buying a box of fish food, walking over to nearby bridges, and feeding the fish that crowd round the area.

In Frankfurt, Germany where we live, we also got into the practice (shortly after I came out of hospital following my heart attack last year) of going down to the river and feeding bread to the ducks. This had to stop though when one of the local residents informed me that it was not allowed (we later found an official board, about 2 kilometers away in a very obscure location which confirmed this. Why, I do not know).

I feed birds every now and then. I doubt that the little amount of time I spend feeding them will make them dependent on me for food and unable to find food for themselves.

I raised three water turtles that had hatched from my back yard a few years ago. I kept them in a 75 gallon fish tank, half filled with water and half rocks for them to climb up on to "sun" themselves (lamps above the tank).

I fed them every day and they got to be so spoiled I thought that they would never try to find food on their own. When the time was drawing near for me to release them into the wild (they were outgrowing their tank and we were moving here to this house on a lake), I began to put minnows in the tank with them in the hopes that they would learn how to catch them themselves. I never noticed them even trying to catch the fish. But, I released them into the lake anyway.

I would see them swimming around where I had put them into the lake. The following year, I saw new baby turtles. Yep, they were catching their own food and thriving! It seems that their natural instinct for catching food is a natural instinct because these turtles had never been in the wild before in their lives but they were doing a fine job of feeding themselves.

They still "visit" me every now and then. I'll see the original turtles sometimes when I'm down at the lake fishing. They still hang around the spot where I had first put them into the water. They've grown quite big! They hibernate in the winter all around our deck and pier underwater because I can see where they've dug themselves out in the Springtime.

So, I'd say that wildlife will never become so dependent on humans for food that they forget how to get it for themselves. I'm sure it is an instinct from birth.

I just feed the humming birds and I know that it makes them produce larger families but they have been having a troublesome time due to pesticides so I justify this.

Hi hiccup,


Don't take any notice to what others are saying, all of a sudden, they become experts, do what you are doing and I'm sure the animals are greatful, fidning the food, the only WILD LIFE I feed is my robins, pigeons, doves and squirells that comes to the front of my house or in the garden, I am known as the bird woman, how nice lol! every animal are thankful, so keep feeding them.


Tamara