Who Really Benefits from Bird Feeders?

Surveying the pros, cons and unknown impacts of backyard bird feeders

By Laura Tangley
Habitat Gardening
Dec 17, 2025

Northern cardinals, American goldfinches and house finches crowd feeders in winter (above). Both cardinals and blue jays (below) are expanding their ranges with help from bird feeding.

AS THE DAYS GROW SHORTER AND TEMPERATURES FALL, many of us haul out our bird feeders stored for the summer and begin filling them with nutritious seeds we hope will sustain our beloved feathered friends over the winter. We have plenty of company. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, some 59 million Americans feed birds, spending a whopping $4 billion on bird seed each year.

Bird feeding’s popularity has soared in recent years, but the pastime is hardly new, says Paul Baicich, co-author of the 2015 book Feeding Wild Birds in America, who notes references to bird feeding dating back to the late 1800s. Several spikes in its prevalence have occurred since then—including the post-World War II years, when suburban living took off, and the early 1980s, when the pet bird industry began selling seed for wild birds in hardware and pet stores across the country. The most recent surge was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when “bird seed sales skyrocketed,” Baicich says. “People were stuck at home. Bird feeding provided cheap entertainment.”

Beyond a diversion, feeding birds can give people a gratifying sense they’re boosting survival for beleaguered songbird populations, many in steep decline. But experts say supplemental feeding saves just a small number of individual birds—and only under circumstances, such as a blizzard or ice storm, when natural foods are temporarily unavailable. Most of the time, “birds can do pretty well without you,” Baicich says. “They don’t need bird feeders.”

Meanwhile, years of observation and study have documented several potentially deadly risks to birds that visit feeders. By concentrating large numbers of birds in small spaces, for example, feeding has fueled the spread of many avian diseases, including conjunctivitis among house finches and goldfinches. (At press time, the risk of bird flu spreading at feeders was low, however.) Feeder birds also are frequent victims of predators—especially outdoor cats and hawks—drawn to known sources of easy, abundant prey. And birds flying to and from feeders, including those fleeing hawks, often crash into glass windows with fatal results.

David Mizejewski, naturalist for the National Wildlife Federation, says all these risks can be minimized by following NWF’s best practices for bird feeding, which include regularly cleaning and disinfecting feeders and keeping cats indoors. “If you put up a feeder, you must commit to making sure you’re not harming birds,” he says.

Some experts worry about other unintended consequences of feeding, not just for feeder birds but also other wildlife. Feeders are visited by many mammals, including mice, rats, squirrels, chipmunks and bears—the latter endangering both people and bears themselves when they are labeled nuisance animals. (If your feeder attracts bears, take it down until their winter hibernation.) “Whether it’s seeds, fruit, nuts or nectar, food normally is in limited supply in the natural world,” says ornithologist Bruce Beehler, a research associate with the National Museum of Natural History. “By offering daily nutritional supplements to free-ranging wild animals, our feeding birds is a massive, unintentional experiment being practiced on our nation’s wildlife.”

An image of a blue jay.

Very few scientists are looking at the results of this experiment, Beehler adds. A handful of outcomes have emerged, nevertheless. For the past 39 years, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada have collaborated on Project FeederWatch, which enlists thousands of volunteers across North America to count birds at their feeders during winter. One finding from these long-term observations is that the northern cardinal, a popular feeder bird in the East and Midwest, has gradually expanded its range northward during this period—a change Cornell scientists attribute in part to bird feeding.

Few people would object to more cardinals, says Beehler, adding, “more cardinals means more joy.” But what about the blue jay, another “wonderful native bird” and common feeder visitor whose range also seems to be growing? Because they often prey on songbird eggs and chicks, more blue jays could spell trouble for vulnerable open-cup nesters such as warblers, vireos and flycatchers, he says.

More worrisome to conservationists: Bird feeding may preferentially help invasive birds such as house sparrows and European starlings that displace native species. In an 18-month study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in New Zealand compared properties with and without bird feeders. They found that, compared to feeder-free sites, sites providing bird food showed dramatic increases in the abundance of nonnative house sparrows along with fewer native grey warblers.

Given both known and unknown risks, should we even be feeding birds? If it makes you happy, absolutely yes, says Beehler, who fills his own feeders with suet and black oil sunflower seed from November to March. “Just remember we’re feeding birds for ourselves, not to save birds.”

Mizejewski agrees that bird feeding is fine, as long as feeders are viewed as supplements to, not replacements for, native habitat. “Wildlife need habitat, not handouts,” he says. “Native plants supply not only seeds but fruits, nuts, nectar, pollen and the insects the vast majority of our backyard birds need as a primary food source for their babies.”

In the end, Mizejewski says, the most valuable contribution bird feeding makes to wildlife conservation is that it connects people to nature. “Getting to see and experience birds leads people to care enough about nature to speak up and protect it,” he says.