From Flora to Fauna

The Bread Myth - Waterfowl Version

You've seen families at the park: "Let the kids feed the ducks! They love bread!"

It's a beloved tradition. Grandparents teach it. Parks even sell stale loaves. It is slowly deforming and killing waterfowl.

🛑 THE PROBLEM: "The Bread Myth"

Bread looks like a treat. Ducks DO eat it eagerly. But here's what bread actually does to waterfowl:

- Zero nutritional value — it fills their stomachs with empty carbs while they starve of the protein and vitamins they need for feather growth and flight
- Causes "angel wing" — a permanent deformity where wing feathers twist outward and the bird can never fly again. It's irreversible after adolescence
- Uneaten bread sinks, rots, and fuels algal blooms that choke oxygen from the water — killing fish and creating botulism outbreaks that poison entire flocks
- Ducks conditioned to bread lose foraging instincts, crowd unnaturally into small areas, and spread disease through concentrated droppings

Parks that allow bread feeding see higher rates of avian cholera, duck plague, and aspergillosis. The "cute" feeding frenzy is a disease incubator.

✅ THE SOLUTION: The Safe Feeding Station

Bring a small bag of SAFE foods that match what waterfowl actually need:

OFFER THESE:
✅ Defrosted frozen peas or corn (cheap, nutritious, ducks love them)
✅ Chopped lettuce or kale torn into small pieces
✅ Plain oats or oatmeal (uncooked, no flavoring)
✅ Halved grapes (cut lengthwise to prevent choking)
✅ Cracked corn or birdseed from any hardware store
✅ Plain cooked rice (no salt, no seasoning)

NEVER OFFER:
❌ Bread, crackers, or chips (malnutrition + angel wing)
❌ Popcorn or pretzels (salt damages kidneys)
❌ Chocolate or candy (toxic)
❌ Moldy food of any kind (aspergillosis is fatal)

🔋 TIMING: Late winter flocks are at their most nutritionally stressed. Natural food sources are at their lowest right now in February — what you bring to the pond this week matters more than any other month.

💡 Pro Tip: Scatter food in the water, not on the bank. It reduces aggressive crowding and lets shy birds eat safely.

Have you heard that you shouldn't feed birds peanut butter? Birds & Blooms Magazine says that's a myth! Read their blog post to learn more.

“I’ve heard that peanut butter by itself can be harmful to birds because it’s so thick and sticky. Is that a myth?” asks Birds & Blooms reader Celeste Pappas of Silver Spring, Maryland.
📸 Kim Dishong

There’s beauty in the colors of late fall.

Hope you had a chance to enjoy some outside time this weekend and find wonder in nature!

Did you catch the Northern Lights last night?? Significant solar activity resulted in a large G4 storm, which meant strong auroral activity in lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere. In Massachusetts, the Northern Lights were visible to the bare eye, although they were faint in most places. Best viewing was through a camera. So amazing and awe-inspiring!

If you missed them, there's a chance for tonight (11/12/25) so step out and take some photos, you might get lucky!

This is a great explanation about how migrating birds are detected by weather radar — and how we know now that so many birds migrate at night!

Recently, many TV meteorologists in eastern North America have been publishing social media posts about bird migration. It’s a logical connection, because migrating birds show up on weather radar, and some nights have provided spectacular radar images of vast numbers of birds on the move.

Unfortunately, every time a meteorologist posts one of these images, commenters jump in to say these couldn’t possibly be birds. I don’t expect to convince the doubters, but for those who are genuinely curious, here is some information.

“Birds don’t fly at night!” Surprisingly, many birds do fly at night during their migrations northward in spring and south in fall. Songbirds like thrushes, warblers, sparrows, buntings and others, which are active strictly in the daytime at other seasons, will fly all night when traveling between their summer and winter homes. Some birds do migrate by day—hawks and swallows, for example—but the majority of migrant species travel at night.

“Radar couldn’t detect something as small as a bird!” Think about it—weather radar can detect things as small as raindrops, and can sense them with enough precision to show whether the rainfall is light, moderate, or heavy. When thousands or even millions of birds are flying high overhead, weather radar certainly detects them.

“Why would birds travel in big circular flocks?” They don’t. On a big migration night, they are spread out like a wide, thin, scattered blanket of birds, all moving roughly the same direction. The radar reflections look like circles because the radar beam sweeps in a circle and reflects the birds that it intersects at certain heights.

“Are all these birds leaving because we’re going to have an extreme winter?” No, it’s normal for birds to migrate south at this season. Hundreds of millions of small, insect-eating birds leave Canada and the northern states in fall to migrate to warmer climates, with many going to the Caribbean, Central America, or South America. Others just migrate a shorter distance within North America. Most migrate before cold weather arrives, and there’s no connection to the severity of the coming winter.

“If all these birds are migrating at night, why don’t we see them in the daytime?” Nocturnal migrants usually land around dawn and look for some safe habitat where they can spend the day, scattering into woods and fields and marshes. For a thought experiment, let’s say ten million birds land in the state of Pennsylvania one morning. Why don’t we notice them? Pennsylvania has about 44,000 square miles of land area, so those ten million birds come out to about 228 per square mile, or about one bird for every three acres. If you walk into a three-acre woodlot, will you notice that one bird?

Bird migration is an amazing phenomenon, with staggering numbers of birds traveling incredible distances and navigating with astonishing precision. For much more information on the topic (although with an emphasis on spring, not fall), may I recommend my book “A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration” (Mariner Books, 2019).

Appreciating the beauty of the woods in late summer.

Lights out tonight and the next few weeks! Artificial lights can confuse migrating birds and insects. Turn off lights at dark to help them find their way.

Lights off tonight friends! Large migration predicted! Artificial light at night, or light pollution, disorients and attracts migrating birds, leading them to fly off course and collide with illuminated buildings, which can be fatal.

Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources has an invasive species newsletter - this newsletter talks about spotted lantern fly and jumping worms among others.

In this month’s Invasive Species Newsletter:

• Spotted lanternfly has now been found in more than 50 cities and towns in 9 different Massachusetts counties. Anyone seeing large numbers of SLF on their property should consult our updated SLF Management Guide.
• Join our community science project (September 1-14) and help us check plants threatened by invasive species for insects and anything else that might be living on them!
• MDAR has a new jumping worm guide. Jumping worms do not need to be reported, but steps can be taken to reduce their spread.
• Tree Check Month is wrapping up, but there’s still time to check your maples for Asian longhorned beetle.

Read more here: https://massnrc.org/pests/blog/?p=3724

If you see a lot of dead horseshoe crabs, they may not be dead but cast off exoskeletons molted by younger crabs.

Have you ever seen a rainbow cloud? Called cloud iridescence, these pretty optical events are caused by sun or moon light diffracting through small water droplets or ice crystals high in the air, which scatters the light into familiar rainbow colors. While not rare, they can be hard to see in bright sunlight. I caught sight of these beautiful rainbow clpuds while looking up through the trees (for birds, of course). Have you ever seen rainbow clouds? Share some pics!