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To understand the current state of bird feeding, it helps to know the hobby’s roots. The practice certainly didn’t start with Henry David Thoreau, but his description of tossing corn to birds at his cabin in his 1854 classic, Walden, perfectly captured the experience of bird feeding at the time. The country was still largely rural, and people who explored attracting birds with food used grain from their own land and homemade feeders. But by the 1920s, ads for seed mixes and ready-made feeders could be found in the pages of catalogs and magazines such as this one, then named Bird-Lore. The consensus at the time— since disproven—that birds wouldn’t survive the winter without supplemental food spurred a growing public interest in feeding birds and a cottage industry to support it. Then the Great Depression hit, and from that calamity, in many ways, emerged both the modern practice and business of wild bird feeding.

During the Depression, the nation’s conservation ethos began to deepen, particularly as the federal government established outdoor work programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps. In a sign of the times, the first edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds came out in 1934, smack in the middle of the doldrums, and promptly sold out—despite costing nearly three times as much as the de facto standard bird guide at that point. Against that backdrop, the conviction that feeding birds helped them was incredibly compelling. According to Feeding Wild Birds in America, a popular history of the early years of the hobby, “bird feeding continued and even grew” throughout the Depression.

But the appeal of feeding birds ran even deeper. Watching birds was a tonic for isolation. As a result of the economic crisis, people who had fallen on hard times increasingly kept to their homes, social distancing for an entirely different reason than we would 90 years later. They found, much as we did, that their yards were their own slices of nature, free to observe and enjoy—along with any creatures they could coax in.

Today, a growing body of scientific inquiry has found that observing birds has positive impacts on mental health, which may help explain why millions upon millions of people have, in time, found bird feeding to be such a powerful draw. As of the last report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, nearly 57 million people aged 16 or older fed wild birds in 2016, spending an astonishing $4 billion on the hobby. And that was before the pandemic bump.

Four billion dollars buys a lot of seed, and yet it’s safe to assume that most folks know little about where their bird food comes from. Almost all of the grain that becomes birdseed sold in U.S. stores originates in the Midwest and Canada, and the bag someone picks up at their local shop, home-improvement warehouse, garden center, or big-box store has traveled a long supply chain to get there. And the funny thing is that most of that grain wasn’t grown for birds in the first place.

There are two important truths about the birdseed business. The first is that birds never get the first-rate grain. Thoreau threw out corn he planned to eat that had failed to ripen. In the Depression, birds got free, unsold, low-quality grain from local farmers; times were hard, and anything better went to people. Today, birds still generally get the lowest-quality portion of a crop, what’s left after growers sell their best seed—that with the highest oil content, for example—for human uses like making sunflower or safflower oil. The second truth is that the grains in most popular mixes are commodities. Sunflower and safflower, millet and milo—they’re all grown at massive scale and bought and sold for a wide variety of uses in global markets. Both of these factors help keep prices low and customers happy. Market research consistently shows that cost is one of the top criteria for birdseed buyers and a key reason that people abandon the hobby.

Events over the past few years, however, have upended business as usual. Take, for example, the extreme drought that wiped out sunflower and safflower crops in the western United States in 2021. Or the sharp rise of fuel prices that sent the cost of transporting grain by truck through the roof. Or the ban on palm oil exports in Indonesia in April 2022, which routed sunflower seeds into a market hungry for other vegetable oils. Or the galloping inflation that has impacted virtually every part of the supply chain from farm to feeder. Add to all that a rising demand for birdseed products, and you’ve got a lesson in basic economics.

“The cost has just continued to climb over the past two and a half years,” says Rob Brunes, the director of bird food supply for Wild Birds Unlimited, a retail store with locations across the United States and Canada. But most consumers may not have even noticed. Brunes, who has nearly 30 years of experience in the business, says that when prices go up, major birdseed producers—knowing sales will plummet if the price of a bag of seed rises—will typically reduce stock or adjust the ratios of their mixes toward lower-quality ingredients, like milo or even oats.

Yet as price-sensitive as traditional seed buyers have always been, something curious has happened amid the tumultuous conditions of the past few years: A segment of consumers—new and old—has shown a growing willingness to pay more for premium products that may not just be better for the birds at their feeder, but also better for birds everywhere.