Attract More Birds to Your Backyard with these basic tips for feeding wild birds. With all the constraints people lived through in 2020, many turned to their own backyards – nature, in particular – for hope, solace, wonder, and even entertainment. Despite the worldwide crisis, nature’s normalcy remained intact; flowers continued to bloom, bees continued to pollinate and birds continued to fly and forage food. (Family Features)
Feeding birds can be enjoyable for any age group and provide stress relief for all who partake. A University of Exeter study focused on nature’s impact on humans in suburban and urban areas, found lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress were associated with the number of birds people saw during afternoons at home. The benefits of birdwatching come from seeing lots of birds – quantity, not “quality” – the study found.
People “felt relaxed and connected to nature when they watched birds in their gardens,” researchers said. These feelings increased with the level of bird feeding in the yard. For millions working and schooling from home, this stress reduction was an unintended bonus.
Data from 2020 shows sales of bird feed, feeders, nesting boxes, and birdhouses spiked as interest in backyard birds soared while people spent more time at home.
Interest in birding isn’t slowing down. If you haven’t tried attracting birds to your backyard, now is a perfect opportunity to start. The experts at Cole’s Wild Bird Products Co. offer these bird feed and feeder basics to attract more birds to your backyard.
Feeders
A variety of bird feeder types placed at different heights attract more birds than one feeder featuring one seed type. Start with two feeder types that accommodate most feed options. Bowl feeders serve not only seeds but also dried mealworms, fruit and suet. An option like Cole’s Bountiful Bowl Feeder comes with an adjustable dome cover you can raise or lower to prevent larger birds and squirrels from getting to food and protect it from rain.
Traditional tube feeders are all-purpose options for bird feeding, especially for small birds that cling. For example, the Terrific Tube Feeder is made with state-of-the-art materials to prevent warping and discoloration and includes a quick-clean, removable base to make cleaning fast and easy. Just push a button and the bottom of the feeder pops off for easy access to the inside. Rinse the feeder with soapy water, dunk it into a water-bleach solution at a concentration of 9-to-1, rinse, dry and reattach the bottom. Regular cleaning of feeders is essential for preventing mold, germs and disease.
Popular Foods
Birdseed: Not all birdseed is created equal. Look for quality blends without cheap filler like red millet and oats. All-natural seed containing no chemicals or mineral oil is safe and more appealing to birds. Top seed picks include all-natural black oil sunflower and Cole’s “Hot Meats” (sunflower meats infused with habanero chili peppers that birds love and squirrels dislike). Or an option like Special Feeder blend, packed with favorites including black oil sunflower, sunflower meats and pecans, attracts the greatest number of wild birds. Offering a wide variety, Cole’s feed is researched and specifically formulated to attract certain bird species, the largest number of birds and the greatest variety of birds.
Insects and Worms: A healthy, lush lawn is one of the best ways to feed birds that prefer insects and worms. You can supplement birds’ diets by serving dried mealworms in a packaged variety that’s easier to feed and less messy than live mealworms. Mealworms are packed with energy and contain essential nutrients, fat and protein.
Fresh Fruit: Apples, orange halves and bananas are favored fruits.
Suet: Perfect for insect-eating birds, suet is a high-fat food that provides abundant calories, rich nutrition and is a high-energy treat.
Using the right feeders and high-quality feed can enhance your backyard and entice more birds, bringing stress relief and enjoyment. For more information on attracting birds to your backyard, visit coleswildbird.com.
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A new way to remove salts and toxic metals from water
New technologies that can clean salty or polluted water could help meet growing water needs.Science Photo Library/Getty Images
Adam Uliana, University of California, Berkeley
A new way to remove salts and toxic metals from water
Most people on Earth get fresh water from lakes and rivers. But these account for only 0.007% of the world’s water. As the human population has grown, so has demand for fresh water. Now, two out of every three people in the world face severe water scarcity at least one month a year.
Other water sources – like seawater and wastewater – could be used to meet growing water needs. But these water sources are full of salt and usually contain such contaminants as toxic metals. Scientists and engineers have developed methods to remove salts and toxins from water – processes called desalination. But existing options are expensive and energy-intensive, especially because they require a lot of steps. Current desalination techniques also create a lot of waste – around half of the water fed into some desalination plants is lost as wastewater containing all of the removed salts and toxins.
I am a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering and part of a team that recently created a new water-purification method that we hope can make desalination more efficient, the waste easier to manage and the size of water treatment plants smaller. This technology features a new type of filter that can target and capture toxic metals while removing salt from water at the same time.
A new way to remove salts and toxic metals from water
Membranes filled with small particles that can capture specific toxic metals can clean water in one step.Adam Uliana, CC BY-ND
Designing an all-in-one filter
To build a single filter that could both capture metals and remove salt, my colleagues and I first needed a material that could remove many different contaminants – mostly heavy metals – from water. To do this, we turned to tiny, absorbent particles called porous aromatic frameworks. These particles are designed to selectively capture individual contaminants. For example, one type of absorbent particle can catch only mercury. Other types specifically remove only copper, iron, or boron. I then embedded these four different types of particles into thin plastic membranes, essentially creating custom filters that would capture contaminants according to the type of particle I put in the membrane.
A colleague and I then placed these membrane filters into an electrodialysis water purifier. Electrodialysis is a method that uses electricity to pull salts and toxins out of water, across a membrane and into a separate waste stream. This waste – often called brine – can become toxic and expensive to dispose in existing desalination processes.
This new approach to desalination – called ion-capture electrodialysis – uses thin membranes and electricity to capture toxic metals as they are pulled from water along with salts.Adam Uliana, CC BY-ND
In my team’s modified process, called ion-capture elecrodialysis, our hope was that the membranes packed with the tiny metal-absorbing particles would capture toxic metals instead of allowing them to move into the brine. This would achieve three benefits at the same time in an energy-efficient manner: Salts and metals would be removed from the water; the toxic metals would be captured in a small, easily disposable membrane – or even potentially be reused; and the salty waste stream would be nontoxic.
How effective is ion-capture electrodialysis?
Once our team had successfully made these membranes, we needed to test them. The first test I ran used membrane filters embedded with mercury-capturing absorbents to purify water from three sources that contained both mercury and salts: groundwater, brackish water and industrial wastewater. To our team’s excitement, the membranes captured all the mercury in every test. Additionally, the membranes were also great at getting rid of salt – over 97% was removed from the dirty water. After just one pass through our new electrodialysis machine, the water was perfectly drinkable. Importantly, further experiments showed that no mercury can pass through the filter until nearly all the absorbent particles in the filter are used up.
My colleagues and I then needed to see whether our ion-capture electrodialysis process would work on other common harmful metals. I tested three membrane filters that contained absorbents for copper, iron or boron. Every filter was a success. Each filter captured all of the target contaminants without any detectable amount passing into the brine, while simultaneously removing over 96% of salts from the water, purifying the water to usable conditions.
Traditional desalination and purification processes produce a lot of often-toxic wastewater, called brine.brozova/iStock via Getty Images
Remaining challenges
Our results show that our new water purification method can selectively capture many common contaminants while also removing salt from water. But there are still other technological challenges to figure out.
First, the highly selective absorbent particles – the porous aromatic frameworks – that my colleagues and I mixed into the membrane are too expensive to put into mass-produced filters. It is probably possible to place cheaper – but lower-quality – absorbents into the filters instead, but this might worsen the water purification performance.
Second, engineers like me still also need to test ion-capture electrodialysis on scales larger than those used in the laboratory. Issues can often come up in new technologies during this transition from the laboratory into industry.
Finally, water treatment plant engineers would need to come up with a way to pause the process right before the membrane absorbents are maxed out. Otherwise, the toxic contaminants would start to leak through the filter into the brine wastewater. The engineers could then restart the process after replacing the filter or after removing the metals from the filter and collecting them as separate waste.
We hope our work will lead to new methods that can efficiently and effectively purify water sources that are more abundant – yet more contaminated – than fresh water. The work really is worth it. After all, the effects of water scarcity are gigantic, on both a social and worldwide level.
[Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]
Adam Uliana, PhD Student in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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