“What’s a garden without birds? Create habitat so they thrive”
...that’s nice AP. What’s a city without decent law abiding people? Create habitat so THEY thrive. I’ll worry about the f’n birds some other time.
Birds bring me a lot of joy. I have hummingbirds and at least 10 other species in my small yard. Had an owl swoop over our patio the other night. We used to have Martins but the foliage encroachment drove them off.
Nice of AP to take a break from its usual belching out of political propaganda, brain washing and pedophilia for a minute! Tweet tweet.
We have done this over many years. This year not a single pest in our veggies. Always have a clean birdbath and back off or quit feeding the seed eaters. The insect eaters sit on our garden stakes and patrol every day.
A garden without birds is a garden that doesn’t have its seeds eaten.
For one thing it's a garden where your tomatoes don't have holes pecked in them before they get a chance to ripen.
I have some birds who apparently think that my garden is their personal smorgasbord, which is fine by me. Seems to have really kept the bug population down.
A garden without birds is a garden I can grow tomatoes in
Also, what’s a garden without a cat or two. Oops!
We live rurally, on a wooded 2-acre lot, and for the past 35 years, I spent lots of time/energy battling the ants using all the commercially available products like Diazinon, with limited results. We have carpenter, red/black and red ants. Every year, they reappeared, in force.
Then I discovered something. Woodpeckers (Pileated, Downy, Hairy, Red-Headed, YB Sapsuckers, I have them all!), when they’re not wolfing down the suet at my feeders, are chowing down on ants. If you’ve never seen a woodpecker “anting”, it’s comical to watch. After they roll and loll in the ants (reason unknown), they set about to gorge on them. I’ve seen 4 birds attacking an ant nest at the same time. It’s a raucous fury! We make a point now of rolling over downed limbs to expose the colonies, and let Woody and his pals do the rest!
Combining that, and periodically sprinkling borax around the foundation, I haven’t seen hardly an ant all season!
Backyard + bird feeder = rats
My wife and I used to have a tree called a weeping mulberry in our backyard. We eventually had it cut down. The limbs grew in a strange way and were all gnarly and entangled and difficult to prune. Also, the birds would eat the mulberries and poop purple bird poop all over the deck. It was nice to get rid of the nuisance tree, but I did enjoy sitting on the deck during fall and winter (the only time it’s cool in Texas) and listen to them chirp and watch them cavort among the leaves.
Until a hawk swoops down and grabs a few. Gruesome— it cured me.
Maybe the author needs to move out of the concrete jungle.
Except my neighbor leaves cat food out for the ferals.
Just this past month I lost the chipmunk and mockingbird which were my porch companions.
My cat loves birds
In the desert I get a lot more lizards than birds. Which is fine, lizards are my first line of defense against bugs.
We have a ton of them and bats. I can sit on the porch and watch the bats zooming over the front yard(1 acre) grabbing bugs before they head to the creek/river. My son thought they were birds but I told him that birds don’t fly that much at a time.