COVID-19 is not a risk to birds. In fact, the pandemic has been very good for our feathered friends.
Scott Karr has ten bird feeders, three bird baths and a fountain surrounding his Charlottesville home. He’s also the owner of the local Wild Birds Unlimited – a business that has prospered during the pandemic.
“We specialize in making your life at home a little more interesting,” he explains.
Since May, the franchise reports double-digit growth as people discovered bird watching. We’re lucky, he says, because many Virginia birds are homebodies too.
“Most of our feeder birds stay here all year around. The northern cardinal, your blue jays, your chickadees, your titmice. We’ve got three common varieties of woodpeckers that come to feeders, blue birds, gold finches – they all stick around,” Karr says.
Although you might not recognize them in their winter disguise.
“One of the questions we get is about the goldfinches. The winter plumage and the summer plumage – especially in the male – it doesn’t even look like the same bird.”
Some customers worry that the birds stop migrating, because we’re feeding them, and they could be killed if the weather turns really cold, but Karr isn't too concerned.
“The only time that’s a problem is if birds nest and we have a real serious cold snap. You know if birds are young, that can cause issues.”
But nature has prepared adult birds to survive in winter.
“If you think about chickadees," Karr says, "they weigh about as much as two nickels and survive in some incredibly harsh environments.”
They and other birds do it by puffing up their feathers to create a barrier between their skin and the cold air.
“I had one couple come into the store one time," he recalls. " They had switched from another bird food to ours, and they were concerned, because they thought they were making their birds fat.”
Birds’ blood vessels are different from ours – also able to hold heat, and some can adjust their metabolism to survive in winter.
The pine siskin, a small brown bird with a striped belly, is vulnerable to a bacteria that is carried in the avian gut. They’re not usually seen here in winter, but this year they’ve arrived and brought salmonella with them.
“I had one customer who had 150 pine siskins! Plenty of people are saying they have 30-40 of these birds, so they are showing up in very, very large numbers, and if one of them is sick it’s just very easy for the salmonella to move from one bird to another. If you find one or more than one deceased pine siskin, then we’re recommending that people take down their feeders for a week or two to give them time to disperse.”
Karr says other birds could catch salmonella from pine siskins, but it’s unlikely they’d get a deadly case. Still, owners should clean their feeders every three weeks. As we move toward spring, he has two other recommendations – adding bird baths and native plants to yards.
“Plants that support insects that the birds want to eat, native plants that grow fruit that the birds want to eat, and if enough people did that, I actually think that it could make a difference.”
And he’s quite sure feeding birds makes for better human health – distracting us from the many worries of our time.
“You know being able to sit quietly and watch these beautiful birds come to your feeders, come to your bath, watch them interact with each other, watch their pecking order is just a great way to set some of those things aside and to watch nature going about her business through the birds.”
Special thanks to Lew Scharpf for providing the birdcalls in this story. He shares them along with his fine bird photos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSiH4fAXkl4
***Editor's Note: Wild Birds Unlimited is a financial supporter of Radio IQ.
