Itself a remake of a Lumière feature, this Edison movie was popular enough in the USA that it is said to have inspired two further remakes by other American studios. In itself, it is a pleasant but bland scene, and neither the subject matter nor the filming technique show anything particularly innovative or skilled, even for the 1890s. Whatever popularity it may have had could only have come from the feelings evoked by the setting itself.
The scene shows a woman and a girl tossing handfuls of bird feed to a yard full of chickens and doves. While there is little action, with what action there is coming mostly from the doves, it is indeed the kind of agreeable rural scene that would likely have made audiences feel peaceful and, perhaps, a bit nostalgic.
The movie itself has a surprising number of rough edges, even for its time, since the Edison film crews by this time already had a good amount of experience. There are a couple of jumpy spots and a lot of scratches, all of which may come only from deterioration over time. But there are other defects that were there from the beginning. A portion of someone's hat (or the top of a head) is occasionally visible at the bottom of the screen, and there are several conspicuous hash marks surrounding the area where most of the birds are feeding. It seems very likely that this was a way of marking out where the action needed to be kept, but even at the time such devices were usually less obvious.
While there are many other Edison features and other 1896 movies that are better in themselves, like most movies of its time this one also is still interesting for what it tells us about the techniques of film-makers and the tastes of audiences in the earliest decade of motion pictures.