Nature’s best — no better formula for birds and babes

EACH YEAR, at about this time, a pair of local magpies and a troop of jackdaws regularly raid the bird table. The jackdaws hang upside down on the peanut feeder, banging away with their beaks.

Both species drive all other birds away. However, the scraps may help to make the magpies less voracious in stealing other birds’ eggs and nestlings to feed their own young.

Also, seen close up, the jackdaws in breeding plumage are very handsome birds, with a jet black crown on a blue-grey mantle, and shiny black wings. Soon, there will be the inexpert, gawky young. The easy pickings at the bird table attracts them.

Whether or not to have peanuts in the feeder during the nesting season is a hotly-debated question. Some say that the tits and finches that frequent it will feed their chicks mainly nut scraps, and this will be bad for them. They won’t get the rich protein available if their parents went hunting caterpillars rather than hanging about the feeder, taking the easy option. Who knows? I’ve come across no study in this field.

Other commentators argue that parent birds will know what is good for their chicks, and the chicks themselves won’t accept food that doesn’t supply their dietary needs. But do baby tits reject peanut scraps? The parents would hardly bother delivering them to the nest if they didn’t. One assumes they gobble them up.

Do baby humans reject “formula” milk substitutes? No, they gobble them up. Like the baby tits gobble peanuts, like the human parents apparently gobble up the manufacturers’ claims that ‘formula’ contains all sorts of healthy ingredients and is an acceptable substitute for, or better than, the real thing.

‘Formula’ is convenient, of course, as are peanuts, for tits. It was originally designed as a resource for orphans or foundlings. The World Health Organisation lists formula food as a last resort where breast feeding isn’t possible. First choice, is the mother herself, then bottle feeding the mother’s milk, then feeding by a wet nurse and, if no human milk is available, then ‘formula’.

As the Ecologist magazine notes, in its May issue, “There can be no food more locally produced, more sustainable or more environmentally friendly than a mother’s breast milk, the only food required by an infant for the first six months of life. It is a naturally renewable resource, which requires no packaging or transport, results in no wastage, and is free.”

For four hundred thousand years, humans, like other mammals, have fed their offspring, for the first months of life, with milk from the mother’s breasts. Then, scientists put together a substitute which manufacturers claimed to be as good or better than the real thing. In just over half a century, it became widely accepted. The claims are not true. ‘Formula’ is a valuable food in emergencies but it is not nutritionally complete and does not contain the immune-boosting properties of breast milk. Therefore, formula-fed babies are twice more likely than breast-fed babies to die in the first six weeks of life.

Meanwhile, manufacturers advertise their products as if they were the must-have answer to proper infant nutrition, something every progressive mother owes her child.

‘Modern’ women, and their husbands all over the world, but especially in Third World countries where ‘modernity’ implies upward mobility, swallow the propaganda as eagerly as their infants swallow the ‘formula’. But it’s a formula of untruths, useful for making international corporations richer, not for raising healthy kids.

Some humans seem to have lost the instinct to feed themselves correctly, even when good food is available and cheap. So, if humans err, why not birds? Taste would be the first test of acceptance. If adult tits like peanuts, wouldn’t their babies? Maybe they think they’re giving them a treat — but do they think at all?

Meanwhile, out-of-doors in this rainy May, the brilliance between the showers is spectacular. The world lights up. It shines. The ash is in leaf and the wet leaves of the ivy that climb it quiver and flash like semaphores in the breeze, bright enough to make one blink. Many places have had almost three times the usual May rainfall and, as I write this, there is still a week to go.

In his poem, Upper Lambourne, John Betjeman, who lived in the same leafy North London square where we once made our home, wrote wonderful lines about this scattering of light ...

“Up the ash-tree climbs the ivyUp the ivy climbs the sunWith a twenty-thousand patteringHas a valley breeze begun,Feathery ash, neglected elderShift the shade and make it run”

Sunlight racing across the garden is worth watching. It’s sometimes hard to keep one’s eyes on the screen!