Landscape and Timber for Bird Feeder Plan

Bird Needs

• When landscaping with birds in mind, it makes sense to consider their basic, life-sustaining needs. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology lays out in its extensive “All About Birds” website, a bird requires food, water and shelter from the landscape, and the homeowner who designs a backyard habitat around these factors goes a long way in maintaining a variety of birds there. Another simple but hugely powerful idea is that of structural diversity. Whether in a city mosaic of a wilderness valley, a plethora of different ecological landscapes abutting one another tends to support more species in close quarters. The “edge effect” is an ecological truism spelling this out: There are usually more animals (and plants) utilizing the boundary, or "ecotone," between two habitats, as where a forest edges onto a grassland, than in the comparatively homogenous interior of either one.

General Landscaping

• A birdfeeder or collection of them obviously supplies part of the food component of backyard avian habitat, but remember that the free-growing vegetation you include can also functions as nourishment. A few elderberry or hawthorn shrubs will attract late-summer and autumn flocks of cedar waxwings and other fruit-eating species, including those fattening up for migration. Having a water source on the property fulfills another requirement for birds, making your yard a more complete habitat. This might be in the form of an ornate birdbath, or a trickling stream or small pond.

Timber

• From a shelter standpoint, many songbirds favor the tangled innards of shrub-thickets, into which they can retreat between foraging in the yard. Other birds, like flickers and jays, often prefer tree roosts. Stands of trees encourage cavity-nesting birds like purple martins, wood ducks and small owls. Keeping an old snag in your woodlot will be appreciated by woodpeckers and other grub-foraging birds as well as by the cavity-nesters.

Considerations

• The same grove that shelters a nesting woodpecker and berry-munching migrants also serves as a fine hunting perch for raptors. It’s unfeasible and unwise to thwart feathered hunters, which, after all, provide critical ecological function in managing the populations of songbirds and other species. But to make your bird feeder or birdbath more attractive and secure for targeted species, you may want these situated farther from the darkness of the wood edge, out of which a Cooper’s hawk or horned owl can strike suddenly. You’ll also want to keep tabs on your localized ecosystem and note other avenues predators may use to ambush feeding birds; free-roaming house cats are another common threat. Make sure to change and clean feeders and water sources frequently.