Purposeful provisioning of food to wild animals is a widespread and growing activity that has the potential to impact populations and communities. Nevertheless, studies assessing use of recreational feeders by free‐living birds during winter are surprisingly rare and largely limited to regions with continental climates characterized by freezing temperatures and snow cover. In contrast, there is little information available regarding bird use of feeders within warmer climates during winter, despite widespread recreational feeding in these areas. In this study, we quantified visitation patterns to bird feeders in a Mediterranean climate to evaluate the relationship between feeder use and several environmental variables known to influence supplemental feeder use in continental climates. We established a network of bird feeders in Corvallis, Oregon, USA, that were filled with black oil sunflower ( Helianthus annuus ) seeds and equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) data loggers that recorded >315,000 visits by 70 individual Black‐capped Chickadees ( Poecile atricapillus ) across a 5‐month period (October 2016–March 2017). We found extensive variation in feeder use, with individuals averaging 1–406 feeder visits/day and using 1–9 of the 21 feeders that were available; individual variability was largely consistent during the course of our study. At the population level, we found that feeder use decreased from the start of our study, and this decline continued through the period when foraging was most limited by daylight, including the winter solstice. In contrast to theoretical predictions and empirical work in continental climates, we found that weather variables did not drive feeder use and that feeder visits peaked at mid‐day and gradually decreased until sunset. Our study indicates that individual‐level differences combined with seasonality to drive feeder use patterns, and we conclude that use of supplemental feeders during winter in Mediterranean climates appears to differ notably from feeder use in continental climates.
Each year hundreds of millions of people intentionally feed wild animals throughout the world. For decades, concerns have persisted regarding the potential for intentional feeding to promote dependency on human-supplemented food, particularly during energetically demanding periods of the annual cycle. In this study, we evaluated whether individuals subjected to experimentally increased flight costs responded by increasing their use of supplemental feeders in a wild, free-ranging population of the black-capped chickadee Poecile atricapillus. We subjected 67 RFID-tagged chickadees to one of three handicapping treatments (heavy feather-clipping, light feather-clipping or unclipped controls) and then evaluated feeder use of each individual relative to their pre-treatment level. Contrary to predictions, we found that chickadees in both feather-clipping treatments exhibited a short-term reduction in feeder use, returning to feeding levels of unmanipulated controls within approximately two weeks of treatment implementation. Similarly, experimental feather-clipping treatments had little influence on changes in the number of feeders used or on the timing of feeder visits across the daily cycle, relative to controls. Our results indicate that experimental handicapping of chickadees led to relatively minor and transient changes in the use of supplemental food with no evidence that handicapped individuals increased their reliance on supplemental bird feeders. These findings suggest that recreational bird feeding is unlikely to lead to feeder dependency in small songbirds during winter, although additional research on this topic should be a priority given the global footprint of intentional feeding of wildlife.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.