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. ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]