Nature & You: Keep wild bird feeders clean and disease-free
As much as it pains me to admit this, dear old Mom was right.
She was always of a wont to say: “A clean home is a happy home.”
It will probably come as a shock to many of the devoted readers of my newspaper column to hear me now expounding on the merits of housekeeping sanitation techniques. Not to worry. Instead, the topic of today’s treatise is in regards to the bird feeders in your home’s backyard.
It’s just an application of good old common sense to periodically remove the old, uneaten bird seed from the bird feeder and toss that old bird seed into the trash can. Next, you’ll want to wash the empty bird feeder with a diluted bleach solution. Needless to say, this is not a chore to be delegated to your children. Bleach spillage can do irreparable harm to clothing.
The primary motivation for going to all of the hassle of cleaning backyard bird feeders is in order to check the spread of some contagious pathogens ... a danger not to humans but, instead, to popular bird feeder visitors such as house finches.
One particular disease (“avian conjunctivitis”) showed up for the first time in Washington, D.C., in 1994 and only three years later it had spread to backyard bird feeders in Oklahoma.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” as my mom loved to say.
A disease-free bird feeder, at the very least, would make my mother proud.
Please do what you can to make mom happy.