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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Victor Meldrew" data-source="post: 1811552" data-attributes="member: 3995">Good point. I think the best we can all do is 'sensible sanitisation', ie. remove obvious dirt build-up, move feeders and tables around the garden where possible, and replace water daily.I guess we need to acknowledge that by feeding birds in our gardens we are 'interfering' with nature, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Our intentions may be good but in the long-run we are applying a negative selective force in an evolutionary sense. That is we are effectively selecting only those finches that manage to develop natural resistance to these diseases will go on to produce future generations of resistant individuals. Nature will always find a way and finch populations will bounce back eventually. On a more positive note we can probably feel good about the fact that many tit species would have fared far worse through the last winter were it not for our garden feeding.</blockquote>