[James_Owen]

So I was wondering what the climate is here as regards feeding bread to wildfowl?

I ask because at the LNR I'm involved with we had a tragedy yesterday when one of the male Mute Swans attacked and drowned a rival. Now territorial disputes are always likely to happen in nature, but the high densities of wildfowl that feeding encourages surely does the birds no favours when it comes to divvying up who gets what space.
We put up posters asking they not be fed, explaining ducks, swans and geese can in most cases easily find enough for a natural healthy diet, but feeding them appears by many to be an inalienable right for visitors to the British countryside.

If I sit watching the bread-fattened ducks at my local reservoir in half an hour I'll see more violence and squabbling between the mallards and other species than I can remember in all my years of going to nature reserves. The unnatural abundance of food really seems to stir up aggression in those packed waters.
At the same site every year rangers dutifully fish out several severely ill cob Mutes, and the post mortems everytime point to botulism, a consequence of a diet chiefly made of (low in protein) bread.

There are other issues of course, rotting food causing disease in the water, and countless are the times I've seen rats making off with entire slices of white bread.

I'll always be in two minds on the issue because I realise that feeding the ducks on the local pond is a great way to get kids in touch with birds, but as a benefit it doesn't seem enough compared to damage it can do to wildfowl flocks. I'd hope we could begin to teach children the joy of observation, of watching, and that ill-considered human influences can be bad for birds, even when we have the best of intentions.