Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Going to great lengths to attract birds to garden

By DENISE COWIE
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Bobbi Cowley prepared a feast fit for a tiny visitor at her garden. She suspended a red feeder full of sugar-water solution at one side of her back door, and a hanging basket filled with red-flowering annuals at the other.

Birds flock to her garden during the year. From her kitchen table, Cowley has a front-row seat for their unscripted theatrics: a tufted titmouse investigating water dripping into a birdbath; goldfinches squabbling over thistle seeds in black-and-yellow hanging feeders; a cardinal checking the nesting potential of an evergreen shrub.

Some 45 species hang out regularly in this part of Chester County, Pa., Cowley estimates, and most find their way to her garden. That’s because she maintains birdbaths, birdhouses, and feeders that offer seeds, suet, fruits and nuts — even a dish of wriggling mealworms for songbirds that like their tidbits alive.

“If you want to attract birds to your garden,” Cowley said, “you have to provide food, water and shelter.”

Edie Parnum’s approach is a bit different. Although she hangs some feeders around her property in Wayne, Pa., Parnum also gardens for the birds, growing native plants to provide food throughout the season — whether it’s the seeds, fruits and berries the native plants produce, or the insects attracted to them.

“Pay attention to what the birds are eating in your yard, and then provide more of that,” said Parnum, a member of the Valley Forge Audubon Society.

Parnum crowds plants close together to provide nesting sites and cover. It is not the style of most serious gardeners, she admits, but it creates a habitat that helps keep songbirds safe from predators.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent figures, nearly 53 million Americans feed wild birds near their homes, and about 13 million “maintain plantings or natural areas for the benefit of wildlife.”

Count a lot of gardeners among them. Workshops and lectures on how to garden for wildlife are increasing in popularity, said Nancy Beaubaire of Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in Bucks County, Pa. Web sites are proliferating, and publishers are pumping out how-to books.

Many people will tell you they feed birds for the enjoyment they get out of watching them.

“We’re doing this because we want them to be around us,” said Cowley, who carries binoculars in her apron pocket when she gardens and talks about birds to children’s groups and garden clubs for the Wild Bird Center in Wayne, a specialty shop where she works part time.

Hummingbirds, which can live several years, return to the same locale for breeding, and when migrating they will use the same stopover places, Parnum said. “So it’s a good idea to put feeders up early and leave them up late, so migrating hummingbirds will come back to them year after year.”

“Now is the time to put out the feeders,” said Parnum, but you’re more likely to attract hummingbirds if you have plants with nectar they savor, such as wild columbine and redbuds in early spring, and bee balm, cardinal flower, trumpet vine and trumpet honeysuckle later in the season.

Creating bird-friendly gardens has a place in the bigger ecological picture, too.

“What we are hoping to do is link properties together, so that birds or other wildlife can travel from a large block of woods through a series of properties to another large block of woods somewhere else,” said Richard Whiteford, who directs Pennsylvania’s Important Mammal Area Project and is a spokesman for the National Wildlife Federation’s Backyard Wildlife Habitat program.

The federation’s office in Reston, Va., said there are more than 50,000 certified backyard habitats nationwide.

If you do a backyard habitat right, Whiteford said, it will provide cover with shrubs and ferns and trees; food, through native plants and trees or bird feeders; and water. “Preferably moving water, so that mosquitoes don’t breed. And you want to be careful of what kind of pesticides you use.”

For bird-watching enthusiast Bill Lamack, native plants are a natural — his job at the Bowman’s Hill preserve includes propagating wildflowers.

Since he lives in an apartment, he does most of his leisure gardening and bird-tracking at his parents’ home in Harleysville, Pa., where he grows a lot of native plants, leaves some dead trees standing for woodpeckers, has a small meadow of native grasses that provides seeds and shelter for a variety of birds, and maintains a pond.

To attract birds, gardeners “should definitely plant fruiting things that ripen over an extended period of time,” he said. The high-sugar fruit of amelanchier and pagoda dogwood ripen early, for instance, and are quickly devoured by robins, mockingbirds and cedar waxwings, among others. Berries of spicebush and viburnums ripen in the fall and are eaten then: “They are higher in fat, which helps to build energy for migration.”

Hollies and chokeberries also ripen in fall, but they aren’t so tasty — the berries hang around to provide winter food.

Insects are an important part of what Lamack calls “the food pyramid for birds.” So that means growing plants that attract bugs, too.

“Birds do their mating and nesting when the insects are prevalent,” he said. “Without the insects, none of the hatchlings would survive. All birds eat some insects — even hummingbirds eat gnats and things like that, because it is good protein.”

A gardener who meets all National Wildlife Federation requirements for feeding and sheltering birds and other creatures can erect a plaque certifying his or her yard as a wildlife habitat.

“But beyond the plaque is what you are doing for wildlife. Anything we can do to help out has got to be worth it,” Whiteford said. “And backyard habitat is really important for that reason.”