Should I feed wildlife in Warley Woods?

We would rather that you didn't leave food on the ground, put food in trees or try to hand feed wildlife.  Your intentions may be good, but there may be unconsidered consequences.

Food on the ground can be eaten by animals for which it is not suitable or they may be allergic to.  This could be wild animals or people's pets.  Uneaten food can rot down, go off, encourage increased numbers of species to the point where they become problem numbers.  We have had people nail and screw bird feeders to trees, leave whole loaves of bread every day, leave chicken carcasses and leave pumpkins after halloween. None of these things are things we would encourage or give permission for if asked. 

We do not yet have problems with feeding in our pond, but as we do now have ducks, we don't want the pond to be a place where people put in bread or seeds for the birds.  These are not helpful either for the ducks or the pond's gently evolving ecosystem.  We have spotted a recent trend of people feeding squirrels by hand.  We really would prefer people didn't do this.  Warley Woods already has a larger than good for the ecosystem number of squirrels by hectare which leads to signficant damage to our trees and makes it difficult for the young trees we plant to survive to become the large trees we all want to see (grey squirrels were not present when all our current mature trees were planted: they are (in tree terms) very new residents.  Supplementary feeding only makes this worse and squirrels are wild animals and can bite.  Not something we really want to deal with in the play area in particular.

We don't want to be kill joys and we know the joy feeding animals can bring, but we believe Warley Woods already has enough natural food for the animals that can be supported within it and so if you want to feed wildlife, do it within your own garden.

Thank you.