Songbirds in Your Yard
Wild birds add color, motion, sound, and excitement to a small garden. They help keep down insects, and their holes help irrigate the ground, but what they mostly do is sing. Try raising goldfish or roses to do that.
Attracting birds is easy even in a small lot, if you provide what they need, otherwise farmers wouldn’t need to errect scarecrows and such to keep the birds away. A yard or garden need provide only insects or seeds to eat, a tree to roost in, a pond or birdbath for water, and an escape route from the inevitable neighborhood cat, and it will attract birds by the flock.
Try to create a yard with more food, water, shelter and nesting opportunities for birds while decreasing your water and pesticide use. Generally, lawn size is decreased, but the diversity of native, non invasive plants is expanded. native plants can provide you with a wonderful back yard as well as providing food and shelter for the birds. Water attracts both birds and wildlife. Bird baths placed around the yard adds aesthetic while providing drinking and bathing opportunities. Place your bird bath so that the birds can quickly dash into some bushes if a cat appears. Surrounding a bird bath with a half dozen hybred tea roses or other small flowering shrubs works well, and looks great.
After a watering place is available, try to supply a good variety of food sources, including nuts, seeds, fruits, and nectar. Each category attracts a different variety of birds.
Nectar from red tubular flowers -scarlet sage, columbine, lobelia, penstemon, azalea, fuchsia, Bee Balm or yucca - will attract Hummingbirds and Orioles. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, and jays are attracted to oaks, hickory, buckeye, chestnuts and walnuts. Fruit bearing trees such as Dogwood, Cherry, Mulberry, and Apple will bring thrushes, robins, catbirds, Cedar Waxwings, tanagers, wrens, vireos and warblers.
Seed bearing plants like sunflowers, and coneflowers, or trees like pines, maples and alders attract Grosbeaks, Cardinals,Juncos, Finches,Titmice and Doves.
After the birdbath, add a birdhouse or some bird feeders especially recommended in fall and winter. This way you can fill a feeder with seeds instead of waiting 10 years for a tree to grow. Birds are much pickier about their houses than food, and pickier about either birdhouses or birdseed than about a bird bath. So providing a reliable source of water is the key. I see robins, wrens, blue jays, sparrows, and grackles drinking and bathing in my pond and birdbath together, where they would never nest together or even in the same type of habitat.
Birdhouses and tall bird feeders are best placed in a border of taller plants, while the kind that hang from a tree limb need to be light enough to hang out of squirrels reach, unless you want to feed the squirrels, and not the birds.
