Ever since Covid in 2020, more and more individuals are discovering the joy of watching birds in their yard from the comfort of their home. The sounds, colors, and behavior of birds can be both endearing and enchanting.

Inviting nature into your life is as simple as making small modifications to your yard in order to make it more inviting to our feathered friends. Wild birds have very basic needs—the same needs we have: food, water, shelter, and a place to rear young.

The best way to accomplish this is through landscaping, sometimes referred to as bird scaping. Planting an abundance of native trees, shrubs, and grasses will provide food, shelter and a place to rear young for the wild birds frequenting your yard.

Different bird species have various diets, such as insects, seeds, and berries. Hummingbirds and orioles drink nectar. Providing a wide variety of plants—seed producing, berry producing, and some that provide nectar will bring the widest variety of birds to your yard.

Most songbirds are dietary specific. They have a preferred palate. We all know that hummingbirds prefer a diet of insects and nectar. You can easily attract hummingbirds to your yard with a hummingbird feeder. You can also attract them to your yard with tubular shaped flowers that produce nectar.

The same is true of other species. You can attract specific types of birds to your yard based on the plants you have in your yard. For example, mockingbirds, robins, cedar waxwings and phainopeplas have no interest in bird seed. However, each of these species is heavily dependent on berries as the main part of their diet. If you want to attract these types of birds to your yard, you need to have berry-producing trees and shrubs.

There are many different types of insect-eating bird species in the Arizona Central Highlands. Where do birds find insects? They are typically found in plants. Having a mixture of both deciduous and coniferous trees, and a variety of shrubs that act as a host for insects, will attract insect-eating varieties of birds such as bushtits, yellow-rumped warblers and Bewick’s wrens.

The most important thing you can do to attract birds to your yard is plant native trees and shrubs. These are the types of plants that birds have co-evolved with over millennia. The added benefit with native plants is they don’t have to be watered once they are established and they are also disease resistant and drought tolerant.

For those wanting to enhance the landscaping in their yard, to make it more bird friendly, access the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) website at https://www.nwf.org/certifiedwildlifehabitat. The NWF has a program where you can get your yard recognized as a “Certified Wildlife Habitat”.

There are five elements to the certification process. I’ve already mentioned the first four: food, water, cover (shelter) and places to raise young. The fifth component is Sustainable Practices. This mean maintaining your yard in natural ways to ensure the soil, air and water stay healthy and clean.

Personally, I feel very strongly that homeowners should not use harmful chemicals in their yard such as pre-emergence products to prevent weeds, herbicides to kill weeds, and pesticides to kill insects. There is no way to prevent birds from ingesting these chemicals. Another reason to avoid using these chemicals is that they eventually end up in our water supply.

Holistic yard maintenance, or sustainable practices, means avoiding the use of herbicides, pesticides and poisons for mice or packrats. This is the safest way to keep the wild birds in your yard healthy and protected from an untimely and preventable death.

Eric Moore is the owner of Jay’s Bird Barn, Arizona Field Optics, and Hallmark in
Prescott, Arizona. Eric has been an avid birder for over 55 years. If you have
questions about wild birds that you would like discussed in future articles, email
him at eric@jaysbirdbarn.com.

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