It is the bread they don't eat

You have probably been told that feeding bread to ducks causes angel wing, a deformity that leaves a bird unable to fly. It gets repeated firmly and it gets repeated everywhere.

The honest position is less tidy. Angel wing is real and is associated with a high-calorie, low-nutrient diet. But the conservation bodies do not agree that bread causes it: one wildfowl trust’s own line is that bread in moderation is fine, and an ornithological body has said plainly that there is scant scientific evidence of bread harming birds, and that little research has been done either way.

What they do agree on is what happens to the bread nobody eats.

The problem is the bread left floating. It rots, it fouls the water, it feeds algal blooms, and it draws birds into crowds where disease spreads.

That is a different instruction from “never feed ducks”. It means the amount matters more than the substance — anything that sinks or gets eaten immediately is fine, and half a loaf thrown in at once is not, whoever it was intended for.

If you want to bring something better, peas are the usual answer, along with sweetcorn, porridge oats and plain birdseed. They sink, the birds finish them, and nothing is left going grey at the edge of the pond.

The argument against feeding at all

Some people in these conversations would stop you here, and their case deserves stating rather than skipping.

Feeding wildlife creates dependency. Birds adjust their routines around a reliable food source and stop working as hard for their own. Where feeding is heavy and constant it builds populations larger than the place can support — one person pointed at resident Canada geese specifically — and the end of that road is culling, carried out by somebody who did not put the food down.

That position is a minority in this record and it is not obviously wrong. If you are only going to feed occasionally, or you cannot commit to it, the case for not starting is real. An abandoned feeder is worse than one that was never there, because something has organised its day around it.

The feeder, if you keep one

Squirrels can be dealt with chemically rather than mechanically. Add cayenne pepper to the seed, or buy seed already treated with it. Mammals taste capsaicin and birds do not — the birds are entirely unbothered and the squirrels stop coming. It is the rare deterrent with a mechanism behind it rather than a hope.

Keep it clean, and keep it filled. A feeder concentrates a lot of birds onto one small surface, which is the same problem as a crowded pond in miniature. Washing it out periodically is not fussiness; it is the reason a feeder can turn into a liability in a year when something is going round the local population. Those years happen more than once, so it is worth knowing what your local wildlife body is currently advising rather than assuming last season’s answer still holds.

Expect more than birds. People reported deer, raccoons and opossums arriving for the spillage, and in bear country a feeder has to come in at night. A bin left accessible does the same job.

Hummingbird feeders have their own rules: fresh sugar water weekly, out of direct sun, and more than one feeder if you can, because a single one turns into a territory that one bird defends against all the others. Window feeders on suction cups work well and put the birds close enough to watch properly — and, as it happens, that is also the safe distance. Birds hit glass taking off from a feeder in a panic rather than flying at it, so the dangerous placement is the middle one. Conservation groups in the United States put the two safe positions at under about three feet from the window or over about thirty.

And crows are worth a sentence of their own, because people who feed them describe something closer to a relationship. They like puzzle foods, shelled nuts, dried fruit. They learn who you are. They bring things and leave them. They also hold grudges — if you ever have to intervene against a crow, the advice from people who have is to disguise yourself, because it will remember your face and it will tell the others.

The mosquito myth, which is why some people start

A lot of feeders and boxes go up on the promise of fewer mosquitoes. Almost none of it works, and the reasons are specific.

The birds that come to a seed feeder are seed eaters. They are not eating your mosquitoes. Purple martins, the bird most often sold on exactly this promise, take mosquitoes as something like one or two per cent of their diet — and they eat dragonflies, which are serious mosquito predators, so the net effect can run the wrong way. One person put the origin of that belief bluntly: it was pushed by the people selling martin houses.

Bats do eat mosquitoes in quantity. But a bat house only keeps bats if there are enough mosquitoes nearby to hold them, which means it works where you least need it, and bats eat dragonflies too.

What actually works is unglamorous and free: find the water. Mosquitoes rarely travel more than a few acres, so a mosquito problem is almost always something stagnant close by. Clogged gutters, a puddle that never dries, the inside of a stack of tyres, a drain catch basin, an uncovered rain barrel, a plant pot saucer, a bottle cap. Empty them and the problem leaves with them. For water you cannot drain, there are bacterium-based dunks that kill the larvae and leave everything else alone, and a film of soapy water works on standing water in the short term.

One thing to hold alongside that, from the same conversations: mosquitoes are pollinators, most species do not bite people, and plenty of things you like eating depend on them. Draining the puddle in your own yard is a reasonable thing to do. Declaring war is not available.