To feed or not to feed?  I agree that “baiting” the birds for your own 
selfish reasons is not right.  Also, feeding a bird in a dangerous location 
is out of the question, but whether to feed or not is a personal question.  
I’m reminded of a parable:

One day a man was walking on the beach and in the distance he saw a figure 
running back and forth from the water’s edge.  As he approached closer he 
saw that it was a boy and he was running up onto the beach, picking 
something up, running to the edge of the water and throwing it into the 
surf.  Upon closer inspection the man saw that there were hundreds of star 
fish lying on the beach.  They had been washed ashore overnight.  The boy 
was picking them up one at a time and throwing them back into the ocean.  
The man approached the boy and asked him, “What are you doing”?   The boy 
replied, “I am saving these star fish, if they are not returned to the water 
soon they will die”.  The man then asked the boy, “With so many star fish on 
the sand, how can you ever hope to make a difference”?  The boy stooped 
over, grabbed up another star fish, ran down the beach to the water, and 
flung it into the surf.  Upon returning to where the man was standing he 
replied, “I made a difference to that one”, and he continued his task.

For what ever reason we are experiencing an irruption of snowy owls. How 
many owls have traveled farther south than normal?  Nobody knows.  Will they 
starve and die during the winter here?  If they survive the winter, will 
they return to their breeding grounds and successfully breed or will they 
die in route, or from a lack of food up north next summer, or from another 
predator?  We cannot tell these things.  Will it make a difference if one or 
two of these owls are fed thru the winter?  It might make a difference to 
them.

Remember we feed the birds for our own personal satisfaction, but maybe, 
just maybe, we make a difference.

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