To appeal to extra birds to your yard, it’s essential to provide them sources of meals. Here an Eastern Bluebird snags some scrumptious (at the very least from the chicken POV) grubs. Andy Molloy/Kennebec Journal
I’ve by no means gotten into birdwatching, however I’m glad it exists. I like birds, however I can’t inform a junco from a chickadee.
During a gathering in Kennebunk late final month, Andrew Tufts, Bringing Nature Home coordinator for Maine Audubon, made the connection between birds and native crops.
The most well-liked meals of child birds, Tufts mentioned, is the soft-bodied larval stage of all kinds of bugs. If these bugs are butterflies and moths, that stage is named caterpillars. For much less engaging bugs, the larval stage has less-attractive names akin to grubs, slugs and maggots.
The soft-bodied larva include quite a lot of vitamins for child birds in an easy-to-catch, easy-to-digest bundle. What the bugs and their larva must survive are native crops, which have developed alongside them and the birds for hundreds of years. The bugs eat the leaves, seeds, flowers and sap of those crops. The bugs’ infants, in flip, get eaten by child birds.
In a chat billed “Beyond Birdseed: Make Your Backyard a Haven for Birds,” Tufts made plenty of ideas that common readers of my column can be acquainted with, akin to planting keystone species of oaks, cherries, birches, poplars willows and maples. Each of those bushes help lots of of bugs.
It takes greater than these bushes to draw birds, nonetheless. To help the best quantity and number of birds, Tufts suggested planting gardens in layers, together with tall bushes, mid-level shrubs or small bushes, and grasses and low-growing perennials. Planting alongside these traces has the extra good thing about lowering soil erosion.
For mid-level crops Tufts beneficial viburnums, particularly the Nannyberry, maple-leaf and Arrowwood varieties. In my very own backyard, our Nannyberry and Arrowwoods nonetheless had berries on them in late January, which make them particularly picturesque when now we have snow. Tufts additionally likes winterberry, dogwoods and blueberries – each high- and low-bush.
He recommends straight species, that means crops as they happen in nature, over cultivars, that are bred in nurseries for specific traits that people discover engaging. He made an exception for the cultivar pink osier dogwood ‘Arctic Fire,’ which has shiny pink stems and is an efficient host for birds.
For evergreens, he beneficial cedar, pine, juniper, fir and spruce. And perennials he likes embody prairie grasses, particularly the Schizachyrium household: little bluestem and switchgrass.
For milkweeds, the host flower of endangered Monarch butterflies, Tufts mentioned gardeners will most likely want swamp milkweed (incarnata) or butterfly weed (tuberosa) over frequent milkweed (syriaca), as a result of they don’t unfold. Common milkweed spreads underground via its roots, making it tough to regulate.
Other perennials he likes are asters and goldenrods.
The birds I’m at all times thrilled to see are hummingbirds. Most years, we see them by our dogwoods, however their specific favorites are literally pink blossoms: cardinal flowers and Columbine.
Avoid pesticides if potential, suggested Doug Hitchcox, Audubon’s chicken specialist and one other speaker in Kennebunk. Yes, browntail moth is a pest that causes nasty, itchy rashes, he conceded, however the pesticides that kill browntail moth additionally kill helpful bugs. Instead, he suggested individuals to remove browntail moth nests.
No-Mow May got here up on the Kennebunk assembly, with some individuals recommending it. No-Mow May is a motion that encourages householders to keep away from mowing their lawns till June to be able to give pollinators sufficient to eat in early spring. I occurred to listen to the identical topic come up earlier within the month throughout a web based discuss by conservationist Doug Tallamy to a joint assembly of the Garden Club Federation of Maine and Maine Audubon. Tallamy, responding to a query, had mentioned No-Mow May is not sensible as a result of the grasses in a garden haven’t any profit for wildlife.
When I requested Tufts about this, he mentioned that Tallamy was most likely pondering of the weed-free, chemically handled lawns of a decade in the past. More Mainers are permitting so-called weeds, akin to early-blooming dandelions and violets, to mix in their lawns, Tufts mentioned. Those flowers do assist pollinators within the early spring when different meals sources are scarce. And mowing in June, after these spring “weeds” have completed blooming provides the crops time to drop their seeds onto the garden the place they will sprout, guaranteeing flowers the next yr to as soon as once more nourish the hungry pollinators.
Tom Atwell is a contract author gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He could be contacted at: [email protected].
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