5 Tips to Make Your Landscape More Bird-Friendly

Many long-time gardeners enjoy inviting birds to their backyards. Birdwatching is entertaining, educational and relatively inexpensive. Setting out bird feeders is a great way to get started, but it's even better to improve their natural habitat in your landscape.

Often, allowing our landscapes to be a little less tidy is a great way to improve bird habitat. Check out these five strategies from the National Garden Bureau for improving your landscape’s habitat value for birds.

Leave the Leaves
If you still have raking to do, consider a new strategy. Many birds feast on critters who make their homes in leaves, as well as in the rich soil leaf-mulch it produces as it decomposes. Decaying leaves and fallen debris serve as a natural mulch, reducing unwanted weed growth, protecting plant roots from extreme temperatures, and retaining moisture in the soil. This natural leaf mulch also serves as a perfect habitat for invertebrates that birds eat, including the pupae of moth caterpillars, a favorite food source for baby birds.

If allowing leaves to remain on the lawn makes you twitchy, consider raking leaves into flower beds, where they can work their magic decomposing into nutrient-rich soil—while also harboring essential food sources for birds.

Build a Brush Pile
If you have the time and energy to do a little more work in the garden this fall, consider building a brush pile. Collect fallen tree branches, cuttings from shrubs, and even non-diseased veggie plants that you’ve cleared from the kitchen garden to create a shelter for birds and wildlife. A brush pile provides shelter for birds, protecting them from bad weather and predators.

If you decorate a live Christmas tree over the holidays, give it a renewed purpose after the New Year by adding it to the brush pile. It’s a fun post-holiday tradition to decorate the repurposed tree with birdseed ornaments or cranberry garlands before adding it to a brush pile. The birds will appreciate the shelter—and the snacks.

Give the Birds a Drink
Birds need fresh water all year long. Fountains, ponds, birdbaths, and even a hollowed boulder that catches rainwater all make excellent water sources. Make sure to keep the water source clean and filled. As winter approaches, consider adding a heated birdbath to provide ice-free water for the birds. 

Plant More Food Sources for Birds
This winter, as you browse garden catalogs, look for additional perennials, shrubs, and trees. Include plants that feed both insects and birds, like echinacea, coreopsis, rudbeckia, switchgrass, goldenrod, and Liatris, for instance. Add some hummingbird favorites, such as salvias, asters, and monardas, to support them as they migrate through your garden—and to welcome the hummingbirds back next year.

Trees and shrubs that produce fruit, such as cedars, hollies, dogwoods, and spicebush, as well as those that provide protein- and fat-rich nuts, like oaks, hickories, and walnuts, support both migrating birds, as well as serve as food sources throughout winter. Plus, evergreen trees and shrubs add a nice pop of color to winter gardens, along with providing food and shelter to your feathered friends.

Make a plan for next spring’s additions to your garden.  For more ideas on plants to add to your landscape, refer to Backyard Wildlife: Planting for Habitat. 

Appreciate the Beauty of Dead Trees
Unless your home is in danger or the tree is a hazard, leave dead trees standing. Your back (or your bank account) will thank you, as will the more than 80 species of birds that rely on dead trees—called snags—for nesting, storing food, hunting, roosting, and resting. Standing tree trunks provide homes for many cavity-nesting species. Woodpeckers often create or enlarge cavities in dead trees, but many bird species will nest in them, including chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, bluebirds, tree swallows, great crested flycatchers, wood ducks, and American kestrels.

In addition to creating habitats for birds, fallen trees and branches support the entire forest food web as they decay into rich soil. The organic material a dead tree contributes to the food web helps support microorganisms, adding nutrients into the soil and providing a feeding ground for invertebrates, which in turn feed the birds.

Bird-Friendly Practices for Small Areas
If you live in an apartment or home without a landscape big enough for food-producing shrubs and trees, you can still attract them. 

• Grow a container garden filled with bird favorites, like compact sunflower cultivars or coreopsis, rudbeckias, nasturtiums and zinnias.  
• Or add planters filled with nectar-rich flowers, like monarda, salvia, and Joe Pye Weed.
• Add a birdbath to your balcony.
• Place a basket of bird-safe, natural fibers, like cotton and short pieces of yarn, on your patio for use as nesting materials.
• Place a birdhouse on a balcony or add a feeder to a kitchen window, and enjoy the view while you dry dishes.

You don’t always need a large space to provide big benefits for birds.

This information is provided as an educational service of the National Garden Bureau,  and our members, with no limitations on its use.