A Bird In The Garden ...

I’ve been a birder much longer than I’ve been a gardener.

My bird list goes back to the late 1950s when I began spending summers in the Berkshires (I was 10) and was befriended by ornithologist and naturalist Bill Lindquist. When I moved to Southampton some 20 years later I had half a dozen feeders around the yard for the winter joys of birding through a window.

It was at that point when I began to appreciate birds as part of my gardening experience. My wife added a few chickens to the landscape and then we rescued a flock of baby ducks whose mom had been hit by a car on Montauk highway. That summer we had no slugs, few bugs and nary a weed. The ducks and the chickens, however, brought in other issues.

When was the last time you stopped to consider all the birds that are in our gardens and landscape and the various jobs they do in keeping insects under control, pollinating plants and tilling the soil?

I’d never really given the topic much thought until one day I was sitting in my living room looking out a window toward my garden. Right outside the window is a lilac bush about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide. It’s never flowered, and we’ve had a live-and-let-live relationship. But on this particular day, the bush was adorned by the orange flashes and flutterings of a pair of Baltimore orioles.

A pair has hung around our house for as long as I can remember. In the spring they fly among the tall trees constantly looking for meals of insects and continuously calling to each other as if to assure their mate that “I’m over here and everything is fine” every 15 to 20 seconds.

This time, however, they had little to say as they were in constant eyesight of each other and totally absorbed in their task of inspecting the lilac for either scale or aphids. They spent the better part of four hours inspecting from top to bottom, side to side, every single branch, twig, leaf and bud for any tender morsel of a meal. My peering out the window didn’t deter them for a second so whatever they were finding must have been delicious.

Then there were my close encounters of the garden kind with some ruby-throated hummingbirds.

I’d always thought of the magnificent creatures solely as nectar sippers and inadvertent pollinators, but they seemed to be plentiful in my garden when there were no obvious plants that would provide them with the sugary sustenance. That’s when I learned that up to 90 percent of a hummingbird’s diet can consist of insects that they can catch in flight or snatch from the inner depths of a deep and complicated flower.

But last year they showed me yet another trick.

I have a huge sugar maple that’s going on toward 150 years. It had an accident a few years back and in midsummer, with a thunderous roar, it dropped a huge limb.

The tree is no doubt stressed and some insects have decided to take advantage. Well, no sooner did the adventitious insects move in than a pair of downy woodpeckers began to scour and inspect the trunk of the tree for insects, eggs and larvae. Day after day they would circle the trunk from bottom to top inspecting, pecking and feeding. But something else caught my eye.

The woodpeckers apparently had a route they followed. Every 20 minutes or so they’d be back at the maple. They’d spend about 10 minutes doing their inspection and feeding, then a hummingbird would appear and follow their path up the tree—presumably seeking leftovers in the holes pecked by the woodies or seeking sweet sap exuded by the maple at the pecking points. It’s an amazing dance to watch and quite a synergy.

I’ve also got another hot spot on the property where I grow a plot of purple coneflowers. Yup, just the plain old purple ones.

They begin to flower in mid-June and continue all through the summer and well into the fall. Flowers are continually maturing and producing seed from mid-July onward. And almost on the very day the first seed ripens, my trusty tribe of yellow finches start making daily feeding visits and inspections.

One of the aesthetic side benefits from gardening is watching the color contrasts between the yellow and black finches and the purple echinacea. It’s just an incredible sight.

There are also the various thrushes. These include robins—who are worm, grub, snail, slug and seed eaters—as well as the thrush itself, which is less common but eating the same diet. Add the catbird and mockingbird and you have a pretty wide variety of birds to adorn the garden and keep the insect populations in balance

The thrushes and catbirds also act as tillers and seed spreaders as they rummage through the garden litter and leaf litter, pecking and turning in their search for food. This not only aerates the soil but exposes seeds to light where they can germinate, which is both a good and bad thing.

And what of the wonderful little chickadee. This small bird can easily be trained to feed out of your hand and is probably one of the most frequent visitors to winter seed feeders.

But as the weather warms in the spring we see fewer and fewer of them as they head up into New England and Canada, where their summer diet is primarily small insects. They will, however, slowly begin to move south again following the maturing seeds of weeds, grasses and other plants in the open fields, woods and gardens.

From early spring to late fall we also see and can attract tree swallows and bluebirds. Both magnificent flyers and aerial acrobats will move into bluebird boxes if you have enough open land. They work from dawn to just after dusk, eating any insect that they can catch.

They are probably the most prolific eaters of mosquitoes and gnats in our area. Both, however, are very sensitive to chemical insecticides, so you can’t have it both ways.

Lastly, I have to mention the nuthatch. There are at least two species in our area and they are quite comical as they move up three trunks tail-first, seeking insects, eggs and grubs on and in the tree bark. They have a delightful song and are quite entertaining to watch.

Yes, there are the bad birds as well. The crows and blue jays, grackles and red wings—who all seem to be able to hone in on a ripe apple, blueberry, peach or strawberry from 10 miles away. But that’s a different column.

If you’d like to know more about the birds that are in your garden or in attracting them, Organic Gardening has a good article at organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/best-birds-your-garden. There are also several good books on the subject. Worth mentioning is Sally Roth’s “Bird-by-Bird Gardening: The Ultimate Guide to Bringing in Your Favorite Birds—Year after Year.”

Keep growing.