As a backyard bird enthusiast, I find watching the bluebird’s life cycle unfold in my yard to be fascinating. Each year, I anxiously await bluebird nesting season and feel a sense of accomplishment when another brood has fledged, even though my role in their life was minimal. I simply provided a nest box while the parents constructed the nest, incubated the eggs, and tended to the young.
Backyard birdwatchers know just what seed or suet to put out to entice certain birds to their yards, but insects are also an important food source. You may be surprised to learn that ninety-six percent of all terrestrial bird species rear their young on insects. Flies, beetles, and crickets may be on the menu but caterpillars are particularly important. This means if you hope to have bird reproduction occurring in your backyard, your yard needs to sustain a healthy insect population. When I say healthy, I mean large numbers, considering more than 5,000 caterpillars are needed for just a single clutch of chickadees (which incidentally, might also find a bluebird nest box to be desirable real estate).
So how do you go about supporting insects, especially caterpillars in your yard? The answer is native plants. Your landscape doesn’t need to be 100% native, so there’s still room for turfgrass for your kids to play or a special hand-me-down plant that holds sentimental value. You want to strive for 70% native. Research on Carolina chickadees found that populations could only be sustained when non-native plants represented 30% or less of the landscape’s vegetation.
Why are natives so important? It’s all about relationships. Many plant-eating insects can only eat species with which they have co-evolved, hence native plants for native insects.
The website greengrove.cc is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.
Flowers are usually the first things that grab our attention when we are selecting plants to add to our landscapes. However, most plants only flower for a short period of time, so it behooves us to consider plants’ other attributes—and there are many! Sometimes the same flowers that seduced us into opening our wallets are replaced with an amazing fruit display. Colorful fruits of all shapes and sizes can add drama to our landscapes throughout the year. In addition to their visual beauty, many fruits are important sources of nutrition for wildlife, particularly birds. Here are a few examples of awesome plants whose fruit shines in the garden in summer, fall, and winter.
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.
The Sedum or Ice Plants are providing a treat for the bees and insects in the garden this September. Many other plants have ‘gone over’ quite early this year so these Sedum blossoms will be quite welcome as a pre-winter energy booster.
One thing is sure the climate in your garden will change. You already know one week will be different to the next and I can’t remember when two months or any years were the identical to others. In many areas you can get 3 or 4 seasons in one day (or in Scotland one hour!).
Come spring, several weeks before I plan to plant each area, I’ll cut or mow or pull the grain and legume combination down, depending on which pair I used and where they’re located, then turn under the remains. It’s like composting in place, with the foliage and underlying root system decomposing to improve soil texture and fertility.Cover crops can serve other purposes: Some specialized ones, like various Brassicas, can also provide not just biomass but other benefits including pest and disease control (more on that from Cornell). The subject is much wider than this simple explanation, but stated most simply:Grasses (like rye, sorghum-sudangrass crosses, and wheat) add organic matter to the soil very effectively. Note that I don’t list buckwheat
Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney’s 2010 book is full of photos of all the oddball things you see outside (if you stop long enough to notice!): egg cases and cocoons and all kinds of webs; folded and curled-up leaves as if something’s hidden inside (it is!); and all manner of bumps, lumps, notches, and holes in foliage, bark, you name it. Even tiny previously unexplained pattern in the sand…and soil…a.k.a. tracks and signs of insects.“I’ve always been interested in everything around me,” says Charley, whose Master’s degree is from the University of Vermont’s field naturalist program. “Then someone gave me a digital camera right after I graduated from college, so I started paying closer attention to the little things. And then I started wishing I had a field guide to tell me what all these signs left by insects and other invertebrates were—but it just didn’t seem to exist.”Charley and Noah took it upon themselves to create that guide, in “Tracks and Sign of Insect
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: