To feed or not to feed. That is the question. Bird feeding has, in recent years, exploded into a gigantic industry. Americans alone spend about four billion dollar's per year on commercial seed for wild birds. The desire to care for wild avians is understandable. But is the feeding of wild birds helpful or harmful to their long-term welfare?
This question is the subject of Darryl Jones' book, The Birds at My Table. Jones, an Australian, begins his book with a personal anecdote to illustrate the unintended consequences of bird feeding. Living in a suburb of Brisbane, he planted flowers and put out food hoping to attract honeyeaters. What he got instead, were hoards of an aggressive, territorial bird called the noisy miner.. Providing extra food changed the natural balance of the bird population, creating an explosion in the growth of these unwanted birds.
That, in a nutshell, is the main argument against feeding wild birds. It disrupts the natural balance of populations, in which large, aggressive birds crowd out other species. . Opponents also argue that it creates unsustainable populations, leading to more diseases and avian parasites. Those in favor of feeding argue that it ensures the survival of individuals during the winter season and increases the number of threatened and endangered species.
Considering the vast amount of money spent on wild bird food, there are surprisingly few scientific studies on the ecological effects of such feeding.. Jones points out that the few studies that have been done are suspect because of their limited sample size and reporting techniques. The conclusions of these studies are also ambiguous. With little data to go by, Jones pads out the book with a number of anecdotal accounts from birders around the world. These stories become repetitive and are of questionable scientific validity..
Nevertheless , The Birds at My Table raises valuable questions for the many bird lovers who unthinkingly provide huge quantities of seeds to their avian friends. The ecological consequences of wild bird feeding will undoubtedly become an increasingly important topic to scientists and the general public in the future.

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Birds at My Table is dense. Jam packed with information especially since my grasp of Australian birds/ecology is...nonexistent. Jones covers A LOT of ground (air?) in this book that turns a distinctly academic eye onto something many people take for granted-why do we feed birds?

Known as “Snow White” on my street by my loving neighbors, I had to read this book to see if there was a rhyme or reason for my bird loving behavior. I also wanted to see why others feed birds and whether or not we are hurting or helping the environment.

What a comprehensive and easy-to-read assessment of those of us who love to feed birds. Darryl Jones does a wonderful job of researching and digging deeply to explain different methods of feeding, times of year, species, and outcomes. And though I am an avid bird watcher and environment “intervener”, I know I need to know the truth about what I’m doing.

I was not disappointed in his writing, as he explained much, however I was saddened to hear that we can affect animals by our intervention and timeliness. As a Christian, I believe that all creatures are created by our living God who designed them with instinct and intelligence needed for survival and procreation. And I’m enamored with knowing more about them because of this love for my Heavenly Father. I want to catch the Design in action, and may times I do!

I appreciated the intelligence of Darryl and his travels. He interviewed many people from many different countries, used real time data for his findings and shared the truth of how these birds interact and live among us. If you are a bird watcher like myself and want to know more about them, you simply have to grab this book. It’s fascinating!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Cornell University Publishing. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 (http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html): “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

A gentle and well-meaning mess of a book, about the history, politics, and science of feeding the birds (tuppance a bag.) The author seems to be trying to straddle several potential genres for his book here: an entry-level academic-ish monograph, a pop-history, a pop-science, and naturalist memoir, but unfortunately doesn't totally hit it off for me in any of the categories, as someone who happily reads any of the four. It's published by Cornell so I automatically stereotyped it as academic, but the publisher's stated audience for the book is "General / trade." Make of that what you will!

The subject of the book is fascinating and (as the author takes a lot of time to stress to you) almost completely undiscussed in any other birding book. Birders are already classic weirdos, but feeding birds is immune from the peeping-tom jokes, as the past time of grandmas and shut-ins. No one who visits your house is ever surprised to see a bird feeder in your back yard. But it's objectively pretty weird. Why do I personally buy specially-marked commercial food for wild birds at Costco along with my own food? Why does Costco, a store that only carries products of the highest middle-class consumptive volume, even sell it? The author presents a good argument for how that habit came to be, and whether or not it should continue to be. I appreciated his good analysis of the limited science we have on the effect of supplementary food on wild birds, and that he didn't present bird feeding as either a virtuous or villainous activity.

The fundamental problems seem structural, he doesn't organize his chapters tidily either by chronology, geography, or topic. I also take some issue with his presentation of feeding wild birds as terribly unique among animal-human relationships. Perhaps where he is from (Australia) where people are more environmentally educated, but in my area it's very common to feed squirrels and deer: the bird-feeding industrial complex is starting to really co-promote squirrel feeding, and chestnut trees are expressly advertised in nurseries as attracting deer. I'm not commercially immune: after years of owning a Squirrel-Buster (tm) feeder to moderate squirrel-busting effect, we got a peanut wreath this to feed the squirrels too.

A worthwhile book for the dedicated birder or backyard environmentalist, but I think too ambiguous and hard to read for the casual pop-science reader.

This book was filled with information on Why we feed birds, how we feed them, and should we feed them.
He brings up the subject of should we feed only in cold months, or after big storms, when the birds life gets disrupted, or continue doing it year round.
It was interesting to hear about the birds that exist in different countries and areas of those countries, and whether it would be better to plant, plants to feed the wildlife or to feed seed, as a supplemental food and if so what types.
I found the information to be a little repetitive, but I guess that is because he is explaining the procedures in many different locations and climates.
It was interesting to see the development of the seed industry, and who around the world feed birds the most, but I loved most the parts that were stories of how people felt about the birds, and their interactions with them.
The book was too full of statistics for me, maybe I just didn't realize the in depth study he was going into and thought I was going to read a more personal story of bird, human relationships.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Comstock Publishing Associates for the ARC of this book

An important work, both from the perspective of scholarship and in terms of practical advice for those who manage bird feeders. The author synthesizes a surprising amount of research that has not been collected in a general overview. I can see where this book will be controversial, and I'm glad that Darryl Jones ventured into this subject despite the inevitability that his study will be critiqued by many. These are the sort of conversations that we should be having on an international level.

The Birds at My Table is not a facile book. It isn't filled with pretty pictures or simple ideas about feeding the birds. It asks hard questions about how, what, and when to feed birds, and even questions whether we should be feeding the birds at all. As Jones points out, feeding birds is probably the most common encounter that people have with wildlife. But how can we be sure that our feeding the birds actually benefits the birds? Are we feeding foods that are truly nutritious? Do our feeding stations spread diseases more rapidly? Does our feeding of birds foster overpopulation of some bird species? Does feeding disrupt migration, leading some birds to stay with an easy food supply only to have them perish due to extreme weather? Do our peanuts actually poison the birds we love with aflatoxins? This book answers some of the very real and very tough questions about our interactions with birds. As someone who used to cringe at watching my mother feed birds cake doughnuts (yes, not kidding, she fed them doughnuts) every day, this book is a timely discussion for anyone who is truly interested in benefitting the birds you want to enjoy.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2155729159

Also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Feeding birds has been one of my guilty pleasures for many years. Along the way I have befriended numerous hummingbirds, countless crows, and an entire family of jays. So I was interested to read a little “serious science” behind what had always been a hobby.


=== The Good Stuff ===

* Darryl Jones looks at the big picture of bird feeding. Does feeding really make any difference to a species? Does it change the species mix of an area? What percentage of a wild bird’s food will it accept from human sources, and does this do the bird, or its species, any harm? Jones takes a shot at answering all these questions.

* Jones uses historical data to give some perspective on the state of wild birds. For example, many species showing up at times and places where they have not been typically been seen. There can be any number of reasons for this, ranging from climate change to changing landscapes and human behaviors. The author explores all of these in some detail.

=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===

* The book got a bit repetitive. Jones takes the reader through numerous discussions of how difficult it is to do statistical studies on birds. To be honest, after the third or fourth mention of it, I was more than ready to concede the point.

* The author occasionally present facts but leaves the reader to his own devices to interpret these. For example, Jones informs us that in 2007, the United States imported enough birdseed to fill 22000 railway hopper cars. But what does that mean? If I think of how many natural seeds there are in the continental US during a typical year, is 22,000 railway cars a significant quantity or not?

* Finally, while the author presents many valid and interesting questions, he leaves the reader short on answers. At the end of the book, I had no idea whether feeding birds was a good idea or not. I appreciate the complexity of the question, and that it resists a simple and definitive answer. But yet the author seems infinitely more qualified that I do to offer an opinion


=== Summary===

While I found the topic interesting, the text got a bit repetitive and off-topic. As a technical professional, I know how complicated statistics can be when applied to somewhat unstructured problems, but I really wasn’t interested in multiple discussions of the topic. Conversely, when the author stayed on topic, the book was full of interesting and thought provoking observations and postulations on this relatively simple hobby.

Why do we enjoy feeding birds? What motivates us to put out food for our feathered friends? Where did this practice originate? Are we really helping the birds by feeding them? These and more questions are explored in the book, “The Birds at my Table” by Darryl Jones.

Jones takes the reader on a search for the answers to these and more questions. Along the way, we visit several continents and meet some of the players in the history of bird feeding. The author looks at the historical origins of bird feeding first. Where did this phenomenon start and when did it change from something people did in winter only to something we do year-round? Then, we get some insight into the global business that has grown up around our activity of feeding the birds. Bird feeders, seeds, bird baths and more are all products that have been relatively recently developed so that people can feed birds in a variety of ways. We feed birds an enormous variety of seed types, and some birds are even fed raw meat! The type of food has to fit the biology of the kind of bird you want to attract. A carnivorous bird will not eat seed and a granivorous bird will not eat meat, of course.

The author did a lot of research for this book and discovered that, while there are plenty of resources available to tell us what to feed the birds, and even how to plant a garden that is bird-friendly, there is a paucity of scientific literature about this practice. Few studies have examined the effects of supplementary feeding on the birds in detail. I found this fact quite interesting.

The book overall is very appealing. It’s not a dry scientific look at bird feeding, but rather a sort of exploratory story of how the author digs deeper to uncover the knowledge and history that is out there. There are interesting facts to be discovered and brought to light. I enjoyed the writing style and found it easy to read. As someone who feeds birds myself, it made me think about my motivations. What do I get from feeding the winged ones?

The motivations of the people interviewed in the book varied as well. Some fed only in winter to help the birds through the tough weather season. Others did it year-round so that they could enjoy observing the birds. There are as many reasons as there are people, but we all share this activity and all seem to enjoy whatever benefits we get from it. The birds also seem to enjoy it.

I think one of my favorite parts of the book was when I learned that bird parents seem to know what sort of nutrition their young need. Rather than bringing huge peanuts to the nest, which could choke a nestling, the birds bring insects to their young, which is what they need at that stage of life. The birds may switch to a seed diet as adults, but the young are fed the more appropriate and protein-rich insect diet. And the birds know this! That was a big eye-opener for me.

This book will be enjoyable to anyone who feeds birds or just loves birds in general. It’s packed full of interesting information and history of the activity of bird feeding. This is not a guide to how to feed the birds. There are plenty of those around. This is a very different approach and I think it will appeal to a wider audience.

A nonfiction book about the science and research behind those little feeders many of us hang up in our backyards or apartment fire escapes. From the cover and blurb, I'd expected a light, breezy read, but The Birds at My Table is instead a quite academic review of the various studies that have analyzed how and why humans feed birds, the effect of all this free seed on the birds themselves, and the history of bird-feeding as an organized hobby and (these days) enormous commercial industry. Sometimes academic to the book's detriment, to be honest; I was looking forward to funny anecdotes more than I was to analyses of the calcium/phosphorus ratios in seed mixes or the effect of adding Vitamin E to fat-heavy supplementary foods.

Still, there's lot of interesting factoids to be found here. Did you know that bird-feeding is hugely controversial in Australia, with many wildlife organizations recommending against it? Or that many Australians who feed their backyard birds anyway do so with meat instead of seed? I was also fascinated to learn that one potential cause of the passenger pigeon's extinction may have been trichomoniasis, a disease commonly carried by the non-native pigeon of city streets, and which may have been passed across species by their coming into close contact at feeders.

Overall a good book if you're interested in the topic of feeding birds, but only if you're prepared for a rigorous dive into the current scientific research.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2295972799

The book with a lot of answers! Do birds use the feeders for their mainstay diet? Is it better to feed birds just in the winter, or can we safely feed them in the summer also? Do feeders spread disease.? How do other countries view feeding birds? Do they always follow what the "law" allows? How is migration changing and why? There are a plethora of questions and answers that have been asked over the years.
Even the studies and questionnaires utilized to find the answers were given the once over. What kind of questions and types of citizens targeted makes a big difference in finding the correct answers. Utilized incorrectly the study can be a bust.
Companies that provide the bird food have become very large as the hobby of feeding birds grows. This author takes a gander at how the companies evolved and what the best ones do right. They types of birdseed offered and quality matter.
Very successful hobbyists have made changes to their yards to invite birds in. This chapter may make all the difference in your feeding experience.
Although the author goes a little deep into the studies section, I did gain new knowledge just hanging around there a bit. Not quite a breezy, easy read, you may be glad you spent some time with this book.

Ecologist Darryl Jones poses some basic questions in this book on the esoteric subject of bird-feeding:

1. Why do people feel the need to feed wild birds?
2. What techniques and food do people use?
3. and, is doing this a good idea at all?

The concept of feeding birds, while it goes back a long way, is quite controversial. In Australia there are very strong beliefs that humans should not offer food to wild birds. However, in colder climes, it is quite common for people to leave food out for birds to get them through the harsh winters. A bird-feeder himself, Jones travels to different countries and discusses what they feed to birds, and when.

Jones notes that there is a surprising paucity of studies into this activity, given both its popularity and the controversy it attracts. He manages to track down some behavioural studies that classify people's reasons for why they feed birds and work out which reasons are the main drivers for this habit. I didn't really find this convincing due to the sparsity of the data.

Jones really hits his stride when talking about the use of bird-feeding to protect endangered species in places like New Zealand. The discussion on the Kakapo is really interesting. Unfortunately the conclusions are mixed; in some cases feeding worked, in others it seemed to disrupt natural breeding habits. Bird feeders are also shown to be vectors for infection and have caused large and widespread outbreaks of disease.

In the end, Jones has no firm conclusions to offer, not least because there is so little data. For myself, I thought that the documented cases where bird-feeding did harm outweigh the behavioural reasons people have for offering food to wild birds.

One of my favorite things to read about is how one small and taken for granted concept or action is explored and it's meaning revealed. That's how I felt reading this book that looks at the implications of bird feeders. It was fascinating, touching, and wonderful and I enjoyed reading it. I was totally fascinated but this topic and will never look at a bird feeder the same way again.

I love feeding the birds (and deer and whatever else happens to wander in to share a meal!) all my neighbors do, too! I enjoyed reading this book, even it based in Australia! It's nice to know folks there feed their critters, too! I liked the idea of finding a kindred spirit half a world away from me! But the author does cover the global interest in feeding birds in other countries, which I enjoyed reading about! I was interested in reading about the negative effects of feeding the birds and the debate about year round feeding, disease spreading from feeders, etc... I hadn't really given much thought to those issues other than to be sure the birdbaths were cleaned daily. Gave me some food for thought. If you like to feed the birds, you'll enjoy this book. Its pretty informative.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free e-copy of this book in exchange for a review.

This was a great read.

In this book, Darryl Jones discusses bird feeding practices all around the world. His observations and anecdotes are substantiated with research and studies. Sometimes the studies are a bit much, but there is a lot of interesting facts in there, so it's worth persevering through the more academic parts of the book. The anecdotes, however, are fascinating. I loved the story about a lady who decided to consider her garden from the point of view of a bird and added some shrubs in which birds could hide before/ after feeding.

Other points of interst: historical development of bird feeding practices; contemporary changes in bird feeding; the perennial issue of "should the birds be fed outside winter or not"; differences in feeding around the world and/ or in feeding different species. While our most common association with bird feeding is giving the birds some grains (or maybe, inappropriately, pieces of bread), there are some species which are fed with fresh fruit... or raw meat.

There is also an interesting fragment concerning the industry of bird food, and changes therein over the last decades; and the questionf of whether feeding can be actually detrimental to birds (and, especially, nestlings) returns time and again. (The answer seems to be: not really, nestlings usually are fed better quality food, i.e., worms and insects, even if the parents eat grain.)

But overall, what shines through is the fact that the author and the people he interviews are genuinely interested and concerned with the welfare of birds. And the stories they share are truly fascinating and inspirational.

I'm very happy that I have read this book. I hope it will be translated into Polish at some point. I would love to have it on my shelf.

Fascinating Insight into the World of Bird Feeding:
This book should come with a disclaimer for people who are not yet fully engaged in feeding wild birds. Once I started reading this book, I was fascinated by Daryl Jones' insight into the universal and complex human behavior of feeding wild birds. Half way through the book, I found myself putting up a bird feeder in my own back yard, being worried about the house sparrow population in Germany, and looking up the bird species mentioned in this book. Through my online search I found myself stumbling onto live bird feeder cams, websites of bird wildlife preserves, and a podcast of Birds and the City, an interview with Darryl Jones on Australia's ABC . With years of bird research and related travels all around the world on his back, Darryl Jones brilliantly explores the motivation behind wild bird feeding and possible consequences of this human intervention. He also asks fundamental questions about the necessity of bird feeding in the wintertime or year-round, the kinds of bird food supplied, as well as bird health and breeding issues related to feeding. It seems that all the people engaged in bird feeding, be it in their own backyard or in a wildlife preserve, make a difference for the birds. And while most birds luckily are not completely dependent on a constant supply of supplemental food, we get hooked into their fascinating world.

A well written educative and informative book that bird lovers and even some biologist would fall in love with, it brings to light their daily routines, tells of the encroachment of man on their habitat and their rehabilitation. This book goes into details about the various types of birds, their environment, and feeding patterns, it enlightens about the fast and damaging changes to their existence. It is interesting and filled with a wealth of information about birds, it is truly a bird lover's delight.

It seems like such a simple thing, feeding the birds. Beyond the casual tossing of leftover picnic crumbs to the ducks, Professor Darryl Jones looks at those who are more deliberate -- those who maintain backyard bird feeders. He wonders whether the regular feeding of birds has an effect and what kind of effect, on both the birds and the humans who feed them.

While he does some original research, for the most part he collects and analyzes the studies that have been done. Those studies have been a varied lot, done by schools and industry, specifically addressing bird feeding questions or often only touching on bird feeding on the way to answering some other question. What he discovers is surprising. For instance, even when neighborhood birds are fed regularly for years, they seem little affected when the human supplied food suddenly stops. It seems that birds rarely rely on bird feeders, even if they take advantage of them. Birds seemed to use human supplied food only rarely for feeding their nestlings, preferring insects and grubs.

On the other hand, backyard bird feeders turned out to be ground zero for spreading bird diseases quickly. Because many types of birds might feed at a single feeder, cross-contamination is a real threat.

Although the discussion of the studies is often more detailed than necessary for this generalist reader, I found Jones's discoveries fascinating and unexpected.

(Thanks to Cornell University Press and NetGalley for a digital review copy.)

Jones, an Australian, looks at the effects of humans feeding wild birds--with the caveat that it is easy to guess many of the second and third order effects, but given the nature of private feeding on private property, near impossible to measure. Feeding most certainly has advantaged aggressive, risk-taking birds willing to be close to dogs, humans and cats for a steady food supply, feeders change migration patterns and timing, contact with wild birds seems to make people more receptive to environmental protection, and human feeding that brings birds close to human applied chemicals can put them at risk. This has a lot more questions than answers, but is an appreciation of the drive that humans have to bring themselves into contact with nature, as well as the changes we bring to it.