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Gardening for Birds

Gardens provide places for birds to find food and water, rest, hide from predators, raise their young and find shelter from predators and the weather.

You can encourage birds to visit and stay in your garden by giving them the four things they need: food, water, shelter and places to raise their young.

How to Do It!

It's simple to turn your yard into a bird-friendly yard. You can start with a few simple things and add more later. Just putting up a bird feeder and a bird bath can often provide instant results. But, as you yearn for more, you'll learn how to turn your yard into a bird heaven. It's the greatest!

Step 1. Think like a bird to understand their basic needs.

Step 2. Evaluate your yard.

Step 3. Provide the four basic things that birds need: food, water, shelter, places to raise their young.

Step 4. Make smart choices to help your birds.

Step 1: Think Like a Bird - Take a Birds-Eye View of Your Garden

To make your yard and garden more attractive to birds, look at it from a bird's perspective. If you were a bird, what would attract you to your yard? Would you find food? Would it be the right food and available when you need it? How about water? Does the garden look safe from predators, like hawks and cats? Can you get to the food and water and back to your nest safely? Is there a place to build a nest? Can you find protection from the wind or driving rain? Is there a good, safe, place to spend the night?

Thinking like a bird helps us understand their four basic needs:

1. Food
2. Water
3. Shelter
4. Place to raise their young

Step 2: Evaluate Your Yard

Evaluate your yard by looking at it from a bird's perspective. Does it provide the four basic needs of birds? Don't let this get too difficult for your first attempt. Think "basic." Food can be a simple bird feeder. Water can be a simple birdbath. Shelter can be that Arborvitae on the corner of your house. A place to raise their young can be that lilac hedge between you and your neighbor's yards.

Now, make a sketch of your yard and include all the landscaping features that you have. Then, pretend you're a bird and think about how you would go about your daily life in your yard of finding food and water; getting shelter from the rain, wind and your neighbor's cat; and picking a good spot to build a nest and raise babies.

Here are a few hints about what birds like:

• Birds like places to perch on tree and shrub limbs to check things out before they fly.
• Different birds need different types and levels of perching places. Give them a choice.
• Birds like secluded areas of vegetation to hide and nest.
• Birds like a variety of vegetation types for nesting, from perennial beds to tall trees.
• Birds like dead trees. Dead trees are great for carving out a nest cavity or a roosting spot. Insects tunneling underneath the bark are a great food source. If it doesn't pose a hazard, leave a dead tree standing for the birds..
• Birds like brush piles. These provide great cover and nesting spots.
• Birds prefer a variety of food. Kinda' like us!
• Birds need water and are particularly attracted to the sound of moving water.
• Birds are always on guard against predators. Give them quick escape routes and safe places to hide.

Step 3: Provide What Birds Need

Food

Birds are great hunters and scavengers and know how to find food. But natural sources of food are disappearing as land is developed into farmfields, subdivisions and shopping malls, birds have a harder time finding food.

There are two ways to provide food for birds:

1. Plants for birds: plants provide seeds, nuts, berries and fruit. Almost all of our native songbirds rely on plants for part of all of their diet. Planting fruit-bearing plants will attract a wider variety of birds to your yard, then if you just offered seed in bird feeders. Fruit-bearing plants are critical during cold weather for birds that only eat fruit and insects, like Robins, when insects aren't available. Bayberry, Winterberry and Crabapples are a favorite food in winter and early spring. When possible use native plants and their cultivars.
2. Bird feeders: birdseed, suet and other foods provided by us to birds can really help birds during critical times of their lives, including migration, breeding, nesting and raising their young, and during weather extremes.

Providing natural sources of food is one of the best ways to attract birds to your yard. Native plants and their cultivars are at the top of the list for attracting birds and providing the nutrition they need. They can be very ornamental and really add beauty to your landscape, in addition to attracting birds.

Using native plants that grow naturally in your area means that you're using plants that evolved with the birds that live in your area - whether year 'round or seasonally. The birds are used to these plants and many are their preferred foods.

Before you pick plants for birds, find out what grows best in your area. Visit a local arboretum or botanical garden, or natural area to see what plants are grown. Then find out what conditions those plants need to grow. Some plants need lots of sun and some need shade. Some need moist soil and some need soil that dries out or drains well. Plant the right plant for your spot that will attract birds. Palm trees in Minnesota won't work, but Pine trees sure will!

Below is a list of our favorite bird-attracting plants. These all grow well from Zones 3/4 to 7/8:

You can learn more about these plants on the Plants for Birds page of our online catalog.

In addition to natural food sources, offering supplemental food in feeders can often help birds get through the lean times. Bird feeders also bring the birds up to you so you can better enjoy them. If you have bird feeders, be sure to join the Project Feederwatch program. It's easy, quick, fun and very interesting.

One of the best types of food to offer birds is black oil sunflower seeds. Most of the common backyard birds will readily eat these seeds. These seeds can be offered in a variety of bird feeders. Just be sure to clean the feeders monthly, particularly tube feeders, to remove contaminated or spoiled seed. Cleaning also reduces the chance of spreading diseases among the birds visiting your feeders.

You'll often see birds eating spilled seed on the ground beneath your feeders. To protect them from cats, place a cat barrier of thorny branches from roses or brambles in a circle around the spilled seed area.

Water

Birds need water all year. They need it not only for drinking, but also for preening to keep their feathers in top shape. Clean feathers are essential for keeping birds healthy and in optimal condition for flying. And nothing seems to attract birds to a backyard or garden more than water.

To give birds water, you can simply pour water into a shallow pan (2-inches deep) that is placed in your garden. Or you can build a pond just for the birds! Check out Avain Aquatics full line of water features just for birds. Their ponds are easy to install in just a few hours! Go to Avain Aquatics' Web site.

Shelter

Birds need shelter to protect them from the weather and from predators, and to provide a place in which to roost at night. Shelter can also provide nesting spots for birds to raise their young. The best shelter is a mixed planting of low and medium sized evergreen and deciduous shrubs, medium and tall coniferous trees, and tall deciduous trees. If you can plant shrubs and trees that also provide food from either berries or nuts, then your plantings will serve a dual purpose.

Nests

Even with the best plantings in our gardens, some birds still need help finding places in which to raise their young. Many birds evolved in woodlands that had old and dead trees in which birds could easily hollow-out cavities for homes. With most of these woodlands now converted to farmlands, subdivisions and shopping malls, along with our quickness to remove dead, damaged and very old trees from our yards, there are very few places for tree-nesting birds to nest.

Tree-nesting birds need our help. Leave dead trees standing if they don't pose a hazard. Put up nesting boxes for cavity nesting birds, such as bluebirds, tree swallows, chickadees, nuthatches, wrens and woodpeckers. They readily use nesting boxes and often use them in winter for nightime roosting.

Step 4: Make Smart Choices

Once you've provided for the four basic needs of birds, you'll find that how you take care of your yard and garden can have an impact on your birds. Keep your yard and garden safe for birds by following good conservation practices:

1. Don't use harsh chemicals. Find alternatives that are safe for you, your kids or grandkids and the birds. Birds can often be your best source of pest control. They may not be 100% effective, but they'll be pretty darn close. Insects are a main source of food for most birds during the summer, so leave a few around for them. Don't poison everything.
2. Use natural or organic-based fertilizers, particularly on your lawn. Birds are like kids -- they put everything in their mouths to see if it is edible. That includes granular chemical fertilizers applied to your lawn. If you wouldn't put it in your mouth, don't put in on your lawn. If you spray apply a fertilizer, get it watered in immediately so that birds are not exposed to it.
3. Make a rain garden. What's that you say? Rain gardens capture runoff from your yard so that it doesn't wash into the road. Place them where the gutters from your house drain into. Dig a slight depression in the ground, plant moisture-loving plants and you've got a rain garden. Robins will use the moist soil in these gardens to build their nests.
4. Mulch your gardens and landscaping. Birds will scratch around in the mulch and find bugs to eat. Mulch will retain moisture, thereby reducing the need to water. Mulch also suppresses weed growth, saving you time. It will also decompose over time, slowly enriching your soil.

Links to Other Bird Sites

You can learn more about birds at the following sites:

• Birds: Our Beautiful Garden Allies, a Spring Valley Roses In the Garden Magazine article
• Bird Source. Find out more about birds North American birds at this site sponsored by Cornell University and the National Audubon Society.
• Project FeederWatch. Be a part of science and track the birds in your backyard. Sponsored by Cornell University and the National Audubon Society
• National Audubon Society

The following books are also full of helpful information on how to garden for birds: