How to welcome winter birds

The Audubon Society is the number one source when it comes to birds. They have some great ideas for welcoming feathered friends to the garden when it gets cold. One of the most important things we do as gardeners is helping wildlife including the birds. When they are having a brood they need lots of bugs to feed those babies.

This red-bellied woodpecker finds a treat at the feeder. The Audubon Society has lots of great ideas about keeping birds happy through the winter. Photo by Doug Oster

The Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania is a great local source for everything birds. This story looks at their Native Plant Center and explains how our winter gardens can help the birds.

Here’s a few ideas from Audubon-

Create a songbird border of native trees and shrubs to shelter your yard from the wind. Choose berry-producing landscape plants, such as juniper trees and shrubs like dogwood, serviceberry, and viburnum; many boreal birds, such as the Cedar Waxwing, the Yellow-rumped Warbler, and several sparrow species, eat berries during the winter. Fall is the perfect time to plant, says Kress—though be sure to put wire-mesh cages around the new plants to protect them from mice, deer, and rabbits.

Make a brush pile in the corner of the yard to shelter the birds from predators and storms and to provide night roosting places. Put logs and larger branches on the bottom and layer smaller branches on top.

Rake leaves up under trees and shrubs—and leave them there. The resulting mulch will make a lush environment for the insects and spiders that these birds, such as the Savannah Sparrow and Golden-crowned Sparrow, like to eat.

Turn part of your lawn into a mini-meadow by letting it grow up in grass and weeds. (Mow it once a year, in late summer.) Seed-eating boreal visitors, including several sparrow species and the Dark-eyed Junco, will benefit from your letting things go literally to seed. “In general, overly tidy gardeners are poor bird gardeners,” Kress writes in The Audubon Guide To Attracting Birds.

Here’s the full story.