Hobby Farms Better Than Wild Bird Feeders? Provide Shelter For Winter Roosting! Providing local wild bird populations with nesting boxes for sheltered, winter roosting can make an even greater impact than feeders. 4.3K views PHOTO: Susan Brackney By now, plenty of gardeners have hung up their shovels and hoes for the season—only to replace these with bird feeders and bag after bag of birdseed. But feeding birds isn’t necessarily the most helpful action we can take to help get them through the winter. “The feeders are a wonderful thing for people, but they’re not that significant for most birds,” says Roger F. Pasquier, author of