Attracting Birds to the Garden!

Hi everyone, Jamie here. Welcome back to my garden. So for the past couple of months I have been absolutely obsessed. I know I feel like I feel the grandma vibes coming, but I've been obsessed with watching birds, bird watching and just seeing what type of birds I have in my garden. And I've made it a, uh, a goal of mine to, to attract more birds to my garden because the more I research it and the more I learn about it, the more I understand how important it is to have birds in your garden. And I do not think I have enough. Now we have just, uh, sewn all our meadow right here. And on this meadow we have been, uh, we have the hose link oscillating sprinkler on there and whenever it turns on, I see all this, all these birds will come to the meadow and they will kind of play around in the water and enjoy the water. And that just made me realize that I probably have things missing in my garden that I need to add to make it a more hospitable place for these birds. Now my parents' house, they are, they are the masters at attracting birds to their garden. They have all these bird feeders, they have all these water fountains, all this moving water, hummingbird feeders. And when you sit in their home and you look out the window, it's like their garden is alive because there's so many birds in their garden. And I just need to learn from them. My mom and dad, they both do such, such a good job and you can just sit there for hours and you can watch the birds and it's absolutely incredible. So besides being an absolute joy to have in your garden, you know, to see the birds, to hear the bird sounds, uh, it's, you know, that's a wonderful thing. But having birds in the garden is also really important for your garden's ecosystem. They are a really great source of pest control and a pest control that is all natural. So following the IPM or integrated pest management rules of limiting the amount of toxicity in your garden to maintain the ecosystem. So if you limit the amount of pest control that you spray on your garden, you are going to continually attract more birds that are going to naturally deal with the bugs that you have in your garden and keep your ecosystem aligned. Now each bird kind of prays and eats different, um, bugs in your garden. So it kind of can benefit you to know what bug you're dealing with and then maybe you can work on attracting that particular bird to your garden to deal with the specific bug. For instance, grasshoppers, a lot of people have problems with grasshoppers and I know there it's grasshoppers are really, really hard thing to treat without really, really strong chemicals. Bluebirds love eating grasshoppers. So if you work on attracting bluebirds to your garden, that is an absolutely natural way to deal with the grasshopper population and hopefully keep it down to a manageable level. If you have a white fly problem in your garden, like I do, uh, you can think about chickadees because chickadees will definitely eat white flies. So if you attract more chickadees to your garden, those are, they are going to eat white flies, which is definitely going to help it. Um, nut hatches, they like to eat earwigs. So if you have a big earwig population and you notice earwigs are keep, they keep getting your hostas and stuff like that. Think about attracting nut hatches to your garden and then tit mice apparently really like eating aphids. Now there's of course overlap and all, you know, there's a lot of birds that like eating aphids and a lot of birds that like eating earwigs, but you kind of get my drift is that if you attract a certain type of bird or work on attracting a certain type of bird to your garden, it can help with pest control. Now one thing that I am really good at in my garden is hummingbirds. I have hummingbird feeders. I have hummingbirds here year round. We have Anna's hummingbirds year round and I see hummingbirds in my garden all the time and I hear them in my garden and I absolutely love it. Hummingbirds and other like Orioles, uh, nectar, uh, eating birds, they are really great for pollination in your garden. So it can definitely help, you know, just like you want to attract bees to your garden. You can attract hummingbirds to your garden by putting up hummingbird feeders and then they're going to go visit other plants in your garden and flowers in your garden and help with your pollination. Oh, look at that. Perfect timing. The sprinkler just went on. So like I said, this is my hose link oscillating sprinkler. I love it. It's so like retro and um, like it just reminds me of like childhood, but I absolutely love it. It's doing a great job in growing my meadow. And if I wasn't out here, there would be birds kind of flocking to this whole area. And that is because a water source is one of the three ways to attract birds to your garden. So we have water source, provide a water source, specifically moving water like the oscillating sprinkler here, um, or a fountain or something like that, or a bubbler. So moving water and then a food source with heaters and stuff like that. So over here, this is all the stuff that I've been accumulating over the past couple of months for my birds, for the birds. Um, so fiat food source feeders, there's different kind of feeders and you kind of want to have all different kind of feeders. There's two feeders like this, right? We all know that one. And then there's platform feeders and some birds like eating from platform feeders more than two feeders. And so you kind of want both. Then there's a night Niger or thistle. This is always so hard for me to find in the stores. I always have to remind myself to, um, to buy it. But this is like finches, like really, really small birds. They come in socks like this, or you can get even a little smaller than this. There's, um, bird feeders that have mesh and those are for thistle or Niger seed. Um, am I saying that right? Niger, Niger, Niger, um, thistle seed, you know what I'm saying? Uh, and that is for smaller birds and my mom and dad, they have this and they refill their, um, their finch feeders all the time. And I think it's one of my favorite birds to see in the garden. Uh, I actually, my fountain over here in my, uh, secret garden over here, I've actually seen finches on this and kind of drinking from this. And of course they're attracted to the moving water. I've seen hummingbirds in this. It's just so fun to see just a little something, having a little bit of moving water can attract birds so much. It's, it's just so great. So anyway, different types of feeders, platform feeder, tube feeder, uh, thistle seed or Niger. Um, there's also a suet station and I've actually never really used suet in my garden. Um, for one thing, it's really hot. So we can only put suet out technically in the winter time unless you find some no melt suet. And so this is for year round suet. So this stuff is not going to melt. I was talking to the lady at the store and she said that she tried this in her garden and it didn't work really well. So I think suet is more for when there's snow, snow cover areas with snow cover cause suet is really, really high nutrition for birds. And so it's perfect for winter time when they need that storage of energy, black oil, sunflower seeds. And then I actually, I like this stuff. This is the no mess bird seed. Um, it's already been shelled so they don't leave shells and there's also not all that extra filler stuff that they're going to leave all around the ground. So that's what this is. It's a little bit more expensive, um, but it's totally worth it. I think I got this off Amazon. Now I do want to say with everything I'm talking about in this video, I am scratching the surface on the information that is out there for attracting birds to your garden. There is so much in depth information and you could really go down a rabbit hole. I have been going down a rabbit hole with all this research and all this information. And it's really interesting. And if you're looking for more specifics, I would encourage you to look up your local, either your local Audubon society or my local one is called Yolo, which is the County I live in. Yolo County Bird Alliance. And they have so much information and so many great resources and so many ways to find local information for birds in your area. So I'm kind of just skimming the surface here, um, focusing on the big picture, which is the three main ways to attract birds to your garden, which is provide a food source, provide a water source and provide a shelter or a nesting spot. So providing shelter for your birds, it can easily easily get you in the weeds with all the information that's out there. There are specific types of nesting boxes and nest, nesting baskets and shelters for each specific type of bird. And it, and I mean, it's, it gets really, really detailed down to the dimensions, the size of the hole right here, where you place them, what you place them on, whether it's a fence, a pole, a tree or something like that, whether it's in an open area or a more wooded type area, you can get very, very specific. So I will put some, um, I'll put the Cornell lab of ornithology. Um, that was what I was kind of going after. They have a really great resource where you can look up your birds. You can basically look up your area, look up the type of bird you're trying to attract, and then they'll give you plans for the nesting box for that particular bird. So what I really wanted is I wanted to attract, I wanted to focus on attracting Western bluebirds to my area. So there's three main types of bluebirds in the United States. There's mountain bluebird, Eastern bluebird and Western bluebird. And where I live, it's mostly the Western bluebird. And I of course want to attract them here for dealing with grasshoppers, but also because it's a bluebird, right? It's beautiful. And so I was looking up the sizes for the nesting boxes and they have, um, plans where you can make your own. It's a fun little craft, but I just found one off Amazon that were the right dimensions for a bluebird. And so that's what this is. And it wasn't that expensive at all. And this one is specifically for bluebirds. If you want to attract morning doves to your garden, which I would love to attract morning doves to my garden, um, they actually need a nesting basket, which you can basically take hardware cloth, cut it into a circle and then make it into kind of like a cone. And that is a place that, um, you know, put that in a tree, hook it to a tree. And that is a place that morning doves will want, will want to hopefully nest at. Uh, they do say it's a good thing to put up your nesting boxes in the fall so that when the birds come in the spring, they're all kind of weathered and worn and all the scent is off of them and everything like that. So that's why I'm putting these out now, but I'm not expecting these to come out, you know, and to come probably until March, April, May or something like that. And then the last thing that I got is this little solar water fountain thing. And it's actually surrounded by fake rock, which I thought was so fun. I can already feel that it's going right now. Um, but I thought this was so cool. I've used these solar water fountains before. I have one in my wildlife pond in the backyard, but I thought this was so neat because I have this beautiful fountain that I love and I haven't been using because I haven't really had a good spot where I could plug it in. I did have this, um, right off my back porch, but it gets so hot there. I didn't think it was a good place for it and I really wanted it kind of tucked into this area, pushed in even a little bit more, but I don't, at this point we don't have power over here. We are going to work on getting, um, because we're going to have like fountains, water features over on the other side of the gazebo. So we're going to have someone come in and install power everywhere. But in the meantime, I thought I could just take this thing and put it right there. Doesn't that look so natural, right? That looks good. And then it's a bird bath with, with moving water, which is perfect. So that will help attract the birds. And then I want to hang up some bird feeders right here and hopefully this will be an area where I will have a lot of bird activity. We'll see. So I'm obviously not an expert on all things birds, but you know, it's kind of fun to learn something new and to kind of work on something else new in your garden. But I would love to hear from all of you, uh, you know, your tips or your, your tricks for attracting birds to your garden and what works for you. So I think what I'm going to do right now is I'm just going to start, I'm going to set up my bird bath. I'm going to set up all my bird feeders, kind of, you know, just kind of work on the nesting boxes, all that kind of stuff just to really get going on attracting birds to my garden. All right, I've got everything all hooked up and hung up. I know there's so many more things that I could do and I will keep adding as time goes on as, and as I come across things like at garden centers and stuff like that, bird houses, bird feeders, all that kind of stuff. But I think I'm off to a good start. I've got five shepherd hooks that I have put up and they are all full with, uh, basically different types of bird feeders. Let me show you. So like I was saying, there's three things that you can do to attract birds to your garden, provide a food source, provide a water source and provide a nesting site or a shelter site. So right here by the gazebo, I have two food sources. I have suet and again, this is the no melt suet because we get so hot here. Uh, I'll see how the birds like this. I don't, Monty really liked it. He was licking up all the crumbs. I'm probably cause it was peanut butter. Uh, but I'll be really interested to see how they like that. Again, I think, I always think of suet as more for, you know, uh, birds that need to store energy for the winter when there's snow and all that kind of stuff. And we pretty much always have some type of food around, you know, we have berries in the winter and all that kind of stuff. Um, but let's see how they like it. They might like it. Then I have these, uh, these thistle socks here. I really want to get a prettier, uh, Finch feeder for the Nigers seed. Uh, but I have these here and they should work pretty well. I know my mom has used them before and the Finches have really liked it. I hung a second one over here by the water source because I know Finches really like water sources. Honestly, all birds like water sources, but this, I'm, I'm really, really happy with this. Um, I have my regular tube feeder with, uh, the no mess bird seed in there. And then over here, here's the platform feeder for the birds who like to eat from platforms and they, this has the black oil sunflower seeds in there. So that's a nice, um, uh, variation of different bird feeders and that should attract a lot of birds depending on how they like to eat. And then I have the bird fountain right here. I was going through and I was deciding which, um, uh, what do you call this thing? Spout thing I liked. And I think I like this one the best. It's really, really pretty. Again, you know, this, this is a plugin fountain. You can have a motor and all that kind of stuff. But how easy is this? I really, really like it, especially with the, the rocks around. I got this off Amazon. I'll link it in the description down below if you guys are interested, but isn't that really pretty? And then I still have, uh, the hose link oscillating sprinkler that's going to be going on. So that will be a food source. I mean, excuse me, a water source. But now as we talk about shelter, the one thing that I got was this bluebird house and luckily Jason put it up for me. So he put it right over here on this pole. So I was reading and it said that, um, a bluebird nesting house is really good to go on a pole about five to six feet off of the ground. You can see it right there. And then it recommended pointing it towards East Southeast. So it's, it's basically East Southeast right now pointing this way. And that just protects it from westerly winds and the hot setting sun. So we will just kind of watch this and see if, Oh my gosh, is that a Monarch? So I never can. I never can tell if it's a Monarch or a Fritillaria butterfly. I think that's the F one. Can you guys see that? Pretty. Course on the butterfly bush. Anyway, so the beautiful bird house there. Thank you to Jason for hanging that up for me. I think that that will be perfect. So now I just have to wait and see if the birds come. I, you know, I will have my phone ready looking for them, but I think this is just a good way to show them that like this is a good spot. This is a good spot for you to come. Um, of course my house would or my garden would be more hospitable to them if I had a couple more protection trees, but those they're obviously planted and they're growing. And so hopefully as they grow the birds will feel more comfortable because in addition to the food source, the water source and the nesting site, you have to have, um, plantings where birds can kind of hide in like shrubs and trees and stuff like that, that they can hide from predators. And it's also a good thing to plant plants where they can basically eat all season long. So not only will they have seeds during the spring, summer and fall, but then they'll have berries during the winter. So service berries, elderberries, um, toy on berry, all that kind of stuff is really good things to plant. So I will be working on planting those in my garden. So let me know your suggestions. If you have any good ideas, let me know if you're going to try and attract more birds into your garden in the comment section down below. I hope you all enjoyed this and I hope you all have a chance to get in your garden today.