3. Feed the birds - Don't feed the birds - Feed the birds
3.1 Feed the birds As with many species all over the earth, bird-life is suffering. So much human activity makes life difficult for these animals. Volunteering with the Hidden Gardens I had begun to learn about many of the invertebrate species present in the Hidden Gardens, and how these are impacted by climate change and other human activity. Because a lot of birds depend on invertebrates for their own diet or that of their young, I understood the impact this would have on bird life. I also know that birds struggle through the winter to find food, and I haven't been averse to intervening on this point and putting food out for them, to lend some of my fellow earthlings a hand. As someone who appreciates evolution, I do believe that a certain amount of winter die off is necessary to the general health of a species, in a well balanced scheme. However, I also know that we don't exist in a well balanced scheme. So I have fed the birds. My friend Lesley really feeds the birds. Fat balls, feeders with nuts and seeds; and the birds flock to her garden, understandably. She has an inspirational feeding station! It was her idea to make feeders by recycling things like plastic water bottles and laundry liquid containers, and I really enjoyed making a recycled bottle feeder at her house the day we went to her's to learn some bird identification.
Although I enjoyed making the feeder, I almost didn't bring it home. We've had a few setbacks trying to invest in  gardening at our flat, and I've reached the conclusion that the management of the drying green round the back is too much out of our control to risk putting any more time, love, and money into the space. It's fair to say that I've got used to not knowing when or if grass will be cut, shrubs pruned or whether weed killer or pesticides will be used. The drying green is also a shared space; neighbours walk their dogs there, and sometimes kids play football. Perhaps if I had invested more in the space at the start and fenced off our bit, taking over grass cutting and hedge pruning from the building manager things might have been easier. But I tried to just fit in around what already existed, and that never really worked. Things came to head last summer when in a botched attempt to deal with some Giant Hogweed using weedkiller (they missed some, one bottom right of the photo below), they also killed, in what appeared to be one long winding strip of destruction, all my potatoes, the black currant bush, the little Lemon Balm I'd been given when volunteering the first time at the Hidden Gardens, and many wildflower seedlings I had sown that spring.
I finally gave up, and joined the waiting lists for an allotment at a couple of different local sites shortly after that. I’d settled down to wait for that.Â
Being in Lesley's large enclosed garden, I'd suddenly felt a pang about the drying green. I thought that I was reconciled to the way things were, but I felt down about it again, wondering not for the first time if there was any way to change this situation. I rallied a little when making the recycled feeder, because I've seen so many birds in the drying green, and in the end I did bring it home to hang. Although interestingly, the birds in the drying green didn't really use it, and carried on foraging in the undergrowth there instead. 3.2 Don't feed the birds - Trichomonosis When I first shared the ideas that I had for a drawing workshop with Lesley and Nausheen, I sent them a picture of the two taxidermy birds that I have, one of which is a Greenfinch. Lesley then told me about Trichomonosis, a contagious respiratory disease caused by the parasite Trichomonas gallinae. Greenfinches are particularly susceptible to this disease. I hadn't heard of this before, and it pulled me up short. I wondered if the little juvenile Greenfinch I'd found all those years ago had been an early casualty to this virus. Birds can become infected by the  parasite at contaminated bird feeders, for example where infected birds have visited and regurgitated food. If a feeding station is not kept clean enough; feeders need washed every week; a well meaning human can become the locus of a sudden die off of the birds they are trying to help. So the situation needs managed. This management seemed alarmingly akin to agriculture to me; as though we are 'keeping' the birds in some way. I recoiled: wondering, How is this wildness? What really spooked me was finding out quite recently that scientists think that it was early avian agriculture that gifted humans influenza. That the common flu wasn't originally a human disease, but through close contact with sick birds, it jumped species. I wondered if, despite Trichomonosis not being a human disease at the moment, it could one day jump species too. All those humans washing contaminated bird feeders weekly? All that contact. This thought chills me to the bone.
You can find out more about this disease on the BTO website, available through the following link: http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/gbw/gardens-wildlife/garden-birds/disease/trichomonosis But as I said, we don't exist in a well balanced system. What am I to do?
3.3 Feed the birds - stop tidying! Well, I inadvertently learned another lesson last spring/summer. During the winter preceding that time, I was still commuting to Edinburgh 5 days a week, and I was not the most productive human outside of work for that period of my life. Something I hadn't managed was the clearing away of dead leaves and other organic detritus from beneath the gooseberry bush (which has somehow survived in the drying green behind my house for a number of years). I knew at the time that this meant an almost certain outbreak of sawflies, but I just hadn't the energy to do anything about it. Spring came and I saw the little dots of eggs on some of the new leaves. Then a week or so later, first instars. Even now I am not sure if I help the situation one iota by removing the leaves affected at this point. The plant looses those leaves whatever I do.
So at a loss how to fix it that year, I did nothing. Inspired by my experience with the Hidden Gardens and organic gardening, I left it alone, and watched to see what happened. I saw a few tiny caterpillars starting to much one day, when I was hanging out a washing. Alongside this I also knew that there were blue tits and blackbirds and maybe even wrens nesting somewhere very nearby, as I had seen and heard them foraging actively in the drying green since the beginning of Spring. Our building manager hires chainsaw men to intermittently denude the whole drying green from vegetation, but they hadn't scalped the fuchsias and privets growing along the back of most of the green that Spring, and there were plenty of undisturbed nesting branches in the space for that season's birds. I'd been nervous for the birds all the time because I knew it was possible the chainsaw men might come any time without warning. But they never did.
One day I took out another washing, and noticed that all of the sawfly caterpillars were gone. Every single one. And having done very little damage to the shrub. At the time I did suppose some animal might have preyed on them (there are spiders and harvestmen all over that area, as well as the birds) but I didn't really know.
Time passed, and during this level of the challenge, I found out about the plight of the once common house sparrow. Through research the RSPB have discovered that a diet of animal matter is essential to the development of young birds. Meal worms at feeding stations have been noted to increase the survival rate of House Sparrow young. Did the gooseberry bush just benefit from a bit of biodiversity this year, I wondered, feeding blue tit, blackbird and maybe even wren young with its sawfly grubs? If so, then it just shows how quickly it can happen, and with relative ease. Give them space and resource and they will come, and things might just balance. Maybe only for as long as everything can survive outside little biodiversity bubbles though. More than ever, I wish the world was not as it is, and that there were more wild spaces on earth; that all the humans personally grew more of their food organically, encouraging biodiversity; became vegan, altogether ceasing the terrible use of land and resources that is animal agriculture; and ultimately did not need to intervene by putting feeders out for the birds.