COM & DUCKS & GEESE BETTER SCURRY

2. Free food isn’t all its quacked up to be.
In addition to the nutritional issues posed by abundant
bread, too many handouts of any kind raise a wide range
of problems for waterfowl. These include:
• Overcrowding: Ducks and geese naturally find
habitats that offer enough food, but handouts can lure
large crowds to areas that wouldn’t normally support
them. Natural foods are also widely scattered, letting
birds eat in relative privacy, while competition is often
fierce and stressful at artificial feeding sites.
• Disease: Too many birds means too many droppings.
That’s a health risk, both in water and on land.
Plus, as the New York Department of Environmental
Conservation points out, “diseases generally not transmissible
in a wild setting find overcrowded and unsanitary
conditions very favorable.”
• Delayed migration: Artificial feeding has been
known to shorten or even eliminate migration patterns of
waterfowl. They may be reluctant to leave a reliable food
source despite the onset of winter, and then struggle to
survive as temperatures fall — especially if the cold discourages
their human feeders.
• Expectations: Our gifts may also spur a few
other negative changes in birds’ behavior. When adult
ducks become obsessed with free bread, for example,
they may fail to give their ducklings a sufficient education
in foraging, thus committing them to a life as beggars.
Once birds are dependent on handouts, they tend to lose
their fear of humans and behave more aggressively.
•
• 3. The leftovers have a ripple effect.
• Some of the bread we toss to waterfowl inevitably
escapes their grasp. If enough calorie-rich foods
accumulate in a pond, they — along with all those extra
duck droppings — can trigger algae blooms that deplete
oxygen from the water. Known as hypoxia, this can wipe
out pond life and rob birds of natural food supplies.
• On land, any moldy leftovers lying around
could be particularly dangerous if
ducks eat them. This is also a risk
when people feed ducks bread that
has already spoiled, and as biologist
Steve Carr recently told CBC
News, it’s potentially fatal.
• “[W]hen it goes bad, it has
that little green mold in it, and
that mold actually causes specific
diseases in ducks,” says Carr, a
professor at Canada’s Memorial
University. “It causes lung diseases,
so it’s not just nutritionally bad
— it can just kill them outright.”
None of this means it’s necessarily
wrong to feed waterfowl. The main
lesson bird experts and wildlife
advocates want to convey is moderation,
which means limiting the
size of handouts as well as avoiding
ponds where lots of other people already toss food.
A little bread might even be OK now and then, although
several other human foods come closer to providing the
right mix of energy and nutrients.
Many conservation groups discourage feeding wildlife at
all, and for good reason. But some also offer lists of alternative
snacks that are less harmful to ducks and geese,
hoping to at least improve the food if they can’t prevent
the practice entirely.
So, if you still feel compelled to feed your local ducks, try
these instead of bread:
• Corn (canned, frozen or fresh)
• Duck pellets (sold online and at pet stores)
• Lettuce, other greens (torn into small pieces)
• Frozen peas (defrosted)
• Oats (rolled or instant)
• Seeds (including birdseed or other varieties)”