Today’s yard work can invigorate tomorrow’s backyard habitat, ripening into a bird — and bird watchers — paradise.
Here are 10 suggestions:
1. Plant native evergreen trees and shrubs. They provide birds important year-round protection from sun, wind, rain, snow and ice. Hemlock, junipers and native red cedars work well, especially when grouped for density.
2. Plant native berry-producing vines, shrubs and trees. Careful planning guarantees nearly year-round food for birds. Consider dogwood, sassafras, wild black cherry, beautyberry, chokeberry, elderberry, serviceberry, bayberry and winterberry. Native holly trees, being both evergreen and berry-producing, double the investment benefit.
3. Offer water year-round. Birds must drink and bathe. When choosing a birdbath, look for designs that limit water depth to an inch and whose sides slope gently. Accommodate smaller birds by adding a few large rocks. Since moving water attracts birds, add a dripper or pump. In winter, install a thermostatically controlled heater.
4. Plant native nectar producers, aiming for spring-through-fall blossoms. Hummingbirds, bees and butterflies will keep your habitat aflutter. Consider native perennials (wild columbine, coral bells, monarda, butterfly weed), vines (crossvine, flame honeysuckle) and bushes (witch hazel, buttonbush, native viburnums). Trees provide nectar, too, especially natives like wild black cherry, tulip and sweetbay magnolia.
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5. Avoid insecticides. Most birds eat bugs — bugs in leaf litter, bugs on plants, bugs in the air. Kill bugs in your yard and you kill birds’ food supply.
6. Reduce lawn. Mowed grass is generally a wildlife wasteland. Nothing eats it; nothing lives in it; nothing uses it for shelter. Add pesticides, and for wildlife, it’s a toxic dump. Maybe leave out-of-the-way patches unmowed. Plant ground cover or shrubs. Go upright with vines.
7. Go a little wild. Give native plants and grasses a non-mowed back-corner spot where they can go to seed. Skip raking there. Leave a rotting log in the midst. Add a brush pile of downed limbs and branches, piled teepee fashion. Set off the wild spot with a decorative fence or hedgerow. Invite neighbors to join you in creating property-line nature areas.
8. Add nest cavities. Commercial or homemade nest boxes, properly mounted to match birds' demands, a predator guard installed and regularly monitored to oust non-native house sparrows and starlings will bring chickadees, wrens, tree swallows and maybe even bluebirds to your yard. In winter, cleaned nest boxes double as protective roost boxes. But a nest box without a predator guard is a snake and raccoon lunchbox.
9. Aim for an overall yard surface of at least 70 percent native. Research proves that a 70 percent minimum is required to sustain even a single family of chickadees. Since songbirds feed their babies bugs and since only native plants support native bugs, a yard without ample natives becomes a yard without breeding birds.
10. Finally, plant more plants. Most of what birds need comes from plants. So nearly any plant aids birds some way — with nest sites, nest material, nectar, berries, seeds, nuts, bugs, roost spots, shelter.
For more, see my "Planting Native to Attract Birds to Your Yard," available at the Wild Bird Center, bookstores and online.
For more information about birds and bird habitat, see Sharon Sorenson's books How Birds Behave, Birds in the Yard Month by Month, and Planting Native to Attract Birds to Your Yard. Check her website at birdsintheyard.com, follow daily bird activity on Facebook at SharonSorensonBirdLady, or email her at chshsoren@gmail.com.
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For the Birds: 10 landscaping tips to make your yard more bird-friendly - Courier & Press
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