Part 1
On any given day in the middle of winter, you can look out my kitchen window and see 12–14 kinds of birds: downy and hairy woodpeckers, red- and white-breasted nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, cardinals, goldfinches, etc. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but think about it: it’s winter, it’s Minnesota, you’re not wearing too many clothes, and you’re short on groceries. Would you stick around?
I do work hard to keep them here: the last time I looked I had at least eight feeders, not counting the bird bath with the heater. I am also lucky enough to live in a fairly heavily wooded area with big spruces for winter cover, and I’m surrounded by like-minded neighbors who also spend their discretionary income on bird seed. Winter doesn’t give you much variety; you get the occasional gift of redpolls and purple finches (winter finches are particularly fickle), brown creepers or cedar waxwings, but these tend to be one-time sightings and then they’re history.
Spring, on the other hand, is all about glorious excess. If you’re a fan of variety and numbers, spring migration is cake on a plate. As birds pour through from south to north, any bird can end up anywhere. And they do. And you don’t have to do anything to make it happen. On a good warbler day in May, you can park yourself in your backyard with a pair of binoculars and see 30 or more species in a couple of hours. You can even sit inside if you want (but you shouldn’t). Spring is the time when, if you keep a backyard bird list, you can run out of ink. And be happy about it.
It’s true that some of what you will and will not see is determined by local geography, but there are things you can do to make your yard a better place for birds. First of all, and here’s the plant sale tie-in–plant some fruit-bearing trees and shrubs. Preferably native, although even buckthorn, that scourge of plant ecologists, does a great job of providing winter sustenance for robins. I’m not advocating buckthorn, I just happen to have a lot of it. I wish I had flowering crabapples, serviceberries, highbush cranberries, pie cherries, grey dogwoods…
Second, provide some water, preferably water that makes a little noise and is nice to look at. There is all sorts of technology for this: ponds, drippers, birdbaths, etc., and you can make it as complicated or as easy as you want. Last summer, my water garden consisted of an old rusty bucket with a single flowering water lily–entirely satisfactory.
Third, be a little messy. Neat is not a bird virtue. I have a great yard for sparrows and thrushes because I have a small patch of woods which no one (namely me) considers raking. All through spring I see fox sparrows, hermit thrushes, white-throated sparrows doing their little backwards kick dances looking for food under the leaves. Dead leaves, brush piles, dried seed heads, etc. all provide food and cover that tend to be missing from urban gardens.
Last, keep your cat inside. I like cats as much as anyone, but cats have this ability to make living birds dead, and one of the immutable tenets of birding is that you can’t put a dead bird on your life’s list. Here’s an estimate: domestic cats in the United States kill approximately 638 million songbirds annually. That’s a lot of biomass. And staying indoors is better for your cat, too. Remember, a bird in the bush is worth a whole lot more than two in the paw.
Part 2
While I still stand behind everything I said in the above article (plant fruit-bearing trees and shrubs, add a water feature, be messy, keep your cat indoors)... I remember at the time thinking that I was being a little short on specifics. What trees and shrubs? What kind of water setup? And which birds are we talking about anyway?
I recently stumbled across a book, Bird by Bird Gardening by Sally Roth (Rodale, 2006), that goes a long way (371 pages, in fact) toward answering those questions.
Bird by Bird Gardening is fun, opinionated, and full of specifics. Sally’s basic premise is that you can tailor your garden to individual families of birds by understanding their habits and needs: food, water, shelter. She defines families both tightly (thrushes, vireos, woodpeckers) and loosely (large finches, small finches).
The bulk of the book is taken up by long chapters devoted to each of 19 individual families of birds. Each chapter includes habitat needs, dietary issues, feeder strategies, suggested plants (including named varieties), and even tentative garden design.
The 19 families generally are those that you would expect to find in back yards: smaller feeder-visiting birds that come and stay for a while. She does not, for example, include raptors, probably because raptor habits tend more toward feeding on the visitors than on the feed. (One exception: when I lived in Alaska, my nearest neighbors had an eagle feeder, a large piece of plywood raised high off the ground on which they placed slabs of old meat. This is not recommended locally.) Sally concentrates on appealing to birds that use the big four food groups: insects, seeds and nuts, fruits and berries, and nectar.
I have a pretty good garden for birds. My backyard bird list is approaching 100 species. I have mature trees, no grass, I never use pesticides, and I am not the neatest. As I write this in early March with 28 inches of snow on the ground, I see goldfinches, juncos, mourning doves, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, a brown creeper and cardinals. But what I really, really want is a resident Carolina wren. I have nesting house wrens every summer, I see winter wrens on migration in most years, I will never have a sedge or a marsh wren (no sedge and no marsh)—but a Carolina wren is well within the range of possible.
Although they are generally considered to be eastern and southeastern birds, Carolina wrens are seen regularly in Rochester and along the Minnesota River valley, and a trio just showed up in a yard in Golden Valley. So I consulted the wren section of Bird by Bird Gardening, and I am going to make a few changes. I am going to plant a grape vine, some prickly pears, and a serviceberry. I am going to look hard at hollyhocks, Malva, Asclepias, and autumn flowering Clematis. I might try to get over my aversion to mealworms. I am going to put up a wren house, and I am never going to rake again. And I will let you know.
We can all make changes that make our yards more bird-friendly. Sally is opposed to naked fencing as “good for privacy but…bad for birds.” A fence that is covered with vines, though, is an asset for both; Sally advocates virgin’s bower, hops, grapes, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, and wisteria. Royal ferns and serviceberries for chickadees; pussy willows, goldenrods and hibiscus for warblers; columbines and Falling Stars (Crocosmia) for hummingbirds: every plant I have mentioned is available at the plant sale.
This book contains an enormous amount of information, so if you love looking out your window and seeing a flash of something unfamiliar or if you just want to give back something to creatures from whom so much is being taken, grab a copy of Bird by Bird Gardening. As Sally says, “Gardening and bird feeding…have big effects on birds.” Let’s work to make our homes and our communities safe havens for birds.
Sidebar: Multipurpose Plants
Most of us don’t have a single bird family that we are interested in but, rather, garden for birds in general. Sally includes a list of “multipurpose plants,” ones that attract more than one family:
- Bayberry
- Blackberries
- Blueberries
- Cherries
- Dogwoods
- Elderberries
- Grapes
- Maples
- Pines
- Prickly pear
- Raspberries
- Sunflowers
- Willows
- Zinnias