This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

More than half of US households provide food for birds.

It's a billion dollar industry. Now a study asks whether the same

feeders that attract birds also attract predators that eat the eggs and newly

hatched nestlings of those birds. We imagine that this food resource on the landscape could have a couple different effects

on relationships between nest predators and their prey.

Ohio State University researcher Jennifer Malpass.

On the one hand, you could see that the food might be attracting predators to certain areas

and that could increase mass predation risk. However, as you said, our predators may be exploiting these food resources

and especially if you've got a good predictable food resource on the landscape that's

easy for predators to access, you could imagine that they could switch to those anthropogenic or those human provided foods like bird feeders and that could perhaps lessen predation risk.

Which could also be a problem because predators help control the population.

Malpass and her team looked at the nests of American Robins and Northern Cardinals in seven

Ohio neighborhoods. They noted the presence are out. Robbins and

noted the presence or absence of feeders

and recorded potential nest predators like squirrels, domestic cats and other birds.

Over the four-year study they observed more than 15,000

day active predators across 19 species, but only brown-headed cowbirds and

American crows were associated with bird feeders.

The results were published in the journal The Condor.

The survival of Northern Cardinal nestlings did not seem to be related to the

presence of these nest predators or even to bird feeders.

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