Have you seen our new duck feeder?
We are delighted to have a new solar-powered, contactless duck feeder at Sandy Lane Park. Friends of Sandy Lane Park will be refilling the duck feeder and will get a quarterly donation from the takings.
Matthew Knight’s “The Feed Ducks Initiative” is now operating feeding stations in public parks in Ireland, the UK and Netherlands.
“The aim of The Feed Ducks Initiative is to make feeding more sustainable by reducing the amount of bread being used and correcting overfeeding,” says Knight who first noticed the problem when he saw families feeding large amounts of bread to the ducks and also throwing it into the lake.
“I knew that feeding bread was not good for wildlife,” he adds. “It had consequences for their habitats and also encourages the spread of disease. I thought there had to be a better way and the light-bulb moment came when I asked myself a simple question: if we put a dispenser in our local park with the right feed, would families stop bringing bread and use the dispenser instead?
“After mulling over it for a couple of days, I approached Cork County Council and they were very keen on the idea. So, I enlisted the help of my 80-year-old father-in-law, Liam Manley, who has a crafty eye for carpentry, and we built the first prototype dispenser in the back garden.
“The response in Carrigaline park was overwhelmingly positive and the council gave us permission to put a dispenser at the lough, another popular duck feeding spot. Outbreaks of botulism had been a problem there in the past and had devastated the wildlife. It was at this point that I realised we could solve a bigger problem not just one in one community.”
Knight knew the idea had legs when within a few months of installing the Cork units he was contacted by UK councils interested in feeders for their areas. “It was back to the drawing board as I knew that extending the initiative meant our dispensers would have to be of a certain size and to work in certain way to successfully scale the initiative,” Knight says. “What we subsequently designed was the world’s first solar-powered duck food dispenser.”
The company now has partnerships with more than 40 local government authorities in Ireland and the UK with plans to bring the initiative to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Source: The Irish Times