The Four Corners is blessed with abundant, beautiful wildlife. We all love seeing deer, elk, turkeys and their furred and winged cousins.
It's tempting to put out food to encourage these visitors and help them through winter. Please don't do it. Feeding wildlife is bad for them, bad for us and usually illegal.
Animals grow dependent on the handouts and fail to migrate or otherwise take care of themselves. The food we offer may fill their bellies with poor quality nutrients.
Feeding congregates animals in large groups, increasing the spread of disease. Large groups of prey animals (deer, birds, squirrels) bring predators (coyotes, lions, bears), which is undesirable. Our food offerings can cause deaths from disease or predators.
Besides, state, county and city laws prohibit feeding wildlife. Colorado Parks and Wildlife reminds us that feeding deer, bears and elk is illegal under state law.
The bottom line is: Don't feed wild animals. Don't set out food you may think of as helpful, such as hay or corn. If you have a luscious garden, fence it so it doesn't become a deer buffet. Enjoy your native plants, but don't do anything more to attract animals.
This all leads to a tricky question: to hang those bird feeders or not? Feeding songbirds is not illegal. A group of finches is unlikely to create a mountain lion problem.
However, that seed also is attractive to deer, squirrels and raccoons, leading to the kinds of problems mentioned above. Bears heading into or coming out of hibernation will empty our seed feeders and hummingbird nectar, which only goes bad places for the bears and for us.
Also, songbirds probably are just as susceptible to problems of over-dependence, disease and imbalanced nutrition as any other animal. So, what to do about the birds?
Educate yourself about songbird behavior and biology. Can you support birds in their migration route (out of reach of deer and bears) and pull it all in when that season has passed?
Learning about our wild neighbors makes watching them that much more fun. Enjoy the animals and a thought-out bird feeder, but be careful that you are not harming your wild neighbors.