Birds make a great addition to your garden, they’re great to look at and they’re useful as well. For instance, they will eat slugs, snails, aphids, insects and other well-known troublemakers.
21.07.2023 - 22:01 / awaytogarden.com
I PUT OUT my first bird feeder of the season on Thanksgiving and got the party started. But there’s more to feeding the birds than just filling the feeders, like how to keep them safe in the age of increased disease transmission or how to provide essential water in the coldest months, and of course, much needed tactics for outsmarting the squirrels.Smart bird feeding and more bird-related wisdom is our topic today with Julie Zickefoose.
Julie is a wildlife rehabilitator and artist and author of various books, including a favorite of mine, “Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-Luck Jay” (affiliate link). She lives and gardens on an 80-acre wildlife sanctuary in Appalachian foothills of Ohio. (Above, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers enjoying suet at her Lifelong Feeder, while a downy waits nearby.)
Plus: Enter to win a copy of “Saving Jemima” by commenting in the box at the bottom of the page.
Read along as you listen to the Dec. 12, 2022 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
bird-feeding best practices, with julie zickefooseMargaret Roach: Hi, Julie, and thanks for being here to guide us this feeder season. I’ve got a lot of customers out there.
Julie Zickefoose: Me too, me too.
Margaret: Yeah. “Saving Jemima” is such a great book. Every time I see a blue jay, I think of you since I read that book.
Julie: Oh, thank you so much, Margaret.
Margaret: Yeah. What was that? Maybe three, four years ago maybe it came out? Yeah.
Julie: It came out in 2018.
Margaret: Oh, so almost five years ago. O.K., good. Also, before we get started on the tips and so forth, I was glad toBirds make a great addition to your garden, they’re great to look at and they’re useful as well. For instance, they will eat slugs, snails, aphids, insects and other well-known troublemakers.
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EVER HEARD the expression “birding by ear”? Despite my years-old collection of CDs (and even older tapes!), I have never gotten good at telling who’s who, sight unseen, perhaps knowing merely 15 of the 60ish avian voices who visit each year. A new online resource called All About Bird Song from Cornell Lab of Ornithology aims to improve our ability to retain the vocalizations by visualizing them—and also reveals what song is all about: its purpose, its mechanics, and just how amazing a feat it actually is.
REGINA BRETT IS MANY THINGS: a breast-cancer survivor; a onetime single parent; one of 11 kids; a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for her commentary in “The Plain Dealer,” Ohio’s largest newspaper. And an author, of the bestselling “God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours,” just out in paperback.
All these animals are usually lumped in the general catchall of “nuisance wildlife,” but it’s critical to know specifically who you’re up against, to do the best possible job at prevention, or to devise a safe, sane and humane solution, if the unwanted animal is already in residence.For advice, I called Marne Titchenell of Ohio State University. She is a wildlife program specialist in OSU’s College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and when I read about the popular workshop she gives to gardeners called, “The Good, the Bad and the Hungry: Controlling Nuisance Wildlife in
IT’S NO NEWS TO YOU THAT I’M A BIRD PERSON (and often described as “birdlike”); to me birds and gardening are inseparable notions. As close as I feel to my feathered companions, I can’t say I’ve ever been as intimate as zoologist Mark Carwardine in the video above. Unbelievable. More bits about birds from my recent travels around the digital realm:
The answer is the pawpaw, and to say that Andrew Moore has a passion for pawpaws and encyclopedic knowledge about them would be an understatement.The Florida-born and Pittsburgh-based writer was just 25ish years old when he began work on what is now the book “Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit,” and he did indeed go on a search for it, or maybe more of a magical mystery tour–through history, horticulture and literally around the nation with many unexpected adventures along the
Here’s the wrinkle, though: Most of us probably don’t know which ones those are, and in fact have misconceptions about who’s who–often deeply ingrained by fear or a visceral sense of creepiness about insects.In her new book “Good Garden Bugs: Everything You Need to Know About Beneficial Predatory Insects,” Mary Gardiner (above and below) introduces us to a world of garden helpers, and she joined me on my public-radio show and podcast to do just that.Read along as you listen to the June 29, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You
Carol, a former longtime educator at the New York Botanical Garden who also worked for the Nature Conservancy, says her own intense curiosity about plants such as Dutchman’s breeches (top photo) is what fuels her endless explorations.Enter to win a copy of “Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast” from Princeton University Press (Amazon affiliate link) at the bottom of the page—and get the link to the podcast of the radio segment from my weekly show that this interview comes from, and how to subscribe.my wildflower q&a with carol gracieQ. The subheadline of the book is “A Natural History,” and I’d like explain what that means–because as you have reminded me your first connection to the plants is not as a
Andy Brand is longtime nursery manager of the famed mail-order and destination nursery Broken Arrow in Hamden, Connecticut, and each September he and I teach half-day workshops in my rural Hudson Valley, New York, garden–with one part of the workshop being about gardening for the birds. Our next one is Saturday 16, 2017 (details at the bottom of this story, or at this other page).But no matter where you are listening, we talked recently about strategies and plants that bring in the birds and more—particularly the top genera of powerhouse woody plants that fuel fruit production in summer and fall for hungry birds, preceded by spring or summer flowers that support pollinators and other beneficials. I’ve also inclu
Today’s guest, the leader of Cornell Lab’s Project FeederWatch, will tell us more about changing bird populations–including not just rare birds but among some of our most familiar backyard species, like blue jays and juncos–and also about how data from birdwatchers helps, plus best practices for feeding birds this winter and more. Emma Grieg is the leader of Project FeederWatch at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, which for more than 30 years has fostered connections between people and birds, and also between birdwatchers and scientists, who benefit from all those extra sets of eyes to help them get a closer look at bird population changes over time. That’s Emma below, o