Charity to the Outdoor Poor

When a blizzard strikes, how should we respond?

From a 1938 issue of Pennsylvania Game News.

I woke up Monday morning and found my world blanketed with snow. Outside my window, I saw dozens of house sparrows mobbing the neighbor’s bird feeder. These birds are aggressive and disorderly on a good day, and the snow seemed to have sent them into overdrive. Six inches of powder had covered up their usual fare of crumbs and seeds, and the millet and sunflower seeds spilling from the feeder made for the easiest eating on the block.

I amused myself watching the chaos at the feeder for a few minutes, then went about getting ready for my day. My guess is that most people who put out bird feeders know that they’re doing it more for their own benefit than for that of the birds. It’s a lot of fun watching chickadees and cardinals gathered outside your window, but I expect that generally people understand birds would get by alright without our help.

But this wasn’t always the case. During a surge in concern for bird welfare at the beginning of the 20th century, hunters, students, and conservationists became aware of birds starving because of severe winter weather and arranged rescue operations to bring food to the hungry. While snow still blankets the ground, I wanted to shoot off this quick piece on how people cared for birds in winters past.

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In November 1911, a cold wave settled over the United States and ushered in the most severe winter that anyone but the elderly could remember. The weather was miserable for most Americans, but it was lethal for birds. Concerned letters poured into Bird Lore (now Audubon magazine) telling of birds suffering and dying because of winter weather.

Because New York’s Finger Lakes had been frozen for so long, starving canvasback ducks became so weak that they could not protect themselves from the crows and gulls trying to eat them alive. New Jersey farmers reported wild birds gathering meekly with the poultry at feeding times. In Iowa one paper claimed that seventy-five percent of prairie chickens and bobwhites had been killed by blizzards.¹

From Ernest Baynes’s 1915 book, Wild Bird Guests, How to Entertain Them.

After hearing so many accounts of suffering birds, the National Audubon Society sent telegrams to agents throughout the country, urging them to mobilize the public and help feed starving birds. In Virginia, one Audubon member convinced a railroad line to distribute two hundred bushels of grain along its route. In Washington, D.C., the mounted police kept feeding stations stocked with food for quail, while in Michigan, mailmen scattered grain as they delivered letters.²

School children worked with fish companies to feed gulls when the local lake froze over. After the kids started laying out food, “the few gulls which had been haunting that neighborhood were heavily reinforced in a day or two and their helpers had a large task.” The Massachusetts Audubon Society ran requests in all of the state’s newspapers asking readers to feed birds during the winter, and claimed that as a result “a large number of birds were saved from suffering and perhaps from starvation.”³

A cartoon published by the New York Evening Mail in response to widespread accounts of birds starving and freezing because of harsh winter weather.

In the spring, once the snow had cleared, H. W. Henshaw, the Chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Biological Survey, took advantage of his position at the head of a government agency to call for a more systematic response to avoid future avian disasters:⁴

“So extensive was the territory invaded by the Ice King that the localities where birds were fed constituted but a few pin-points in a vast territory, in the rest of which our feathered friends were left to shift for themselves. It is thus apparent that more perfectly organized efforts to save our birds are needed, and … a central committee, to provide for the winter feeding of birds, should be organized to coordinate the very scattered and disconnected activities that now prevail.”

No such committee was ever formed, but that didn’t stop cities and states from organizing to feed birds under their jurisdiction. In 1913, the Rhode Island Audubon Society put out a map of bird feeding stations set up around Providence. And the following year, Ohio’s state game warden sent a request to farmers and communities to help feed quail and other birds whose food had been covered with snow. Boy scouts answered the call by carrying grain, suet, and bread to deposit at shelters in the countryside. “Little girls of the sewing classes of the public schools” helped out too, by crocheting suet bags to hang from trees in the parks “to save the birds from starvation.”⁵

All of this concern for birds was not driven purely by compassion. Bobwhites were the species most directly targeted by feeding initiatives, and while they were particularly at risk of starvation, they were also particularly valued by hunters as game. The relatively new market for ready-made bird houses and bird feeders responded by running advertisements mourning the fact that “thousands of dear little birds die of starvation every year” and promised that with one of their feeders, “you can save many of them.”⁶

The US Department of Agriculture also encouraged people to build their own houses and feeders, and emphasized what I imagine is still the primary motivation for putting up bird feeders today. In a 1914 bulletin, the USDA stated that in winter, birds were “often pushed for food, and if we supply this need they will report daily at the lunch counter and help to relieve the tedium of our indoor life.”⁷

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Winter can be a difficult time for birds. On freezing nights, survival can rest on a knife’s edge. Keeping body temperatures up enough to make it through the night depends on getting enough calories during the day, and getting those calories takes more energy when temperatures drop and snow covers the ground.

But birds are resourceful, and the ones that stick around in winter are built to survive conditions like these, assuming their habitat meets its side of the equation. It’s much more valuable for birds to have a robust and intact habitat of native plants that provide food and shelter year-round than the feast and famine of an undependable bird feeder. Audubon provides recommendations for supporting winter birds in your yard, like letting native grasses go to seed and leaving leaf-piles under trees to create habitats for the spiders and insects that birds depend on.

The most valuable lesson from last century’s bird feeders is not that we need to scatter grain in the winter. It’s that we need to mobilize with that same speed, energy, and creativity in response to whatever risks birds might face. And today’s birds are confronted with a blizzard of threats – habitat destruction, pesticide use, predation by cats, collision with windows, and above all, a warming world. What will it take for us to meet these challenges?

1. Pearson, T. Gilbert. “Birds and the Recent Snowstorm.” Bird Lore, Vol. 14 no. 2, March-April, 1912.

2. Ibid.

3. Winters, Howard. “Gulls.” State of Ohio Department of Public Instruction. Arbor and Bird Day Proclamation, Ohio Arbor Day Program. Bulletin No. 2, Whole Number 14. 1916; “Reports of State Societies, and of Bird Clubs: Massachusetts.” Bird Lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1915.

4. Pearson, T. Gilbert. “Birds and the Recent Snowstorm.” Bird Lore, Vol. 14 no. 2, March-April, 1912.

5. “Junior Audubon Work.” Audubon. Vol 17, no. 6. United States: National Audubon Society, 1915; Stevens, George. “The Toledo Museum of Art Bird Campaign.” State of Ohio Department of Public Instruction. Arbor and Bird Day Proclamation, Ohio Arbor Day Program. Bulletin No. 2, Whole Number 14. 1916.

6. The Guide to Nature. United States: Agassiz Association, 1914.

7. Dearborn, Ned. “Bird Houses and How To Build Them.” US Department of Agriculture, Farmers’ Bulletin 609. September 11, 1914.