To add a Wilson’s Warbler and other songbirds to your Yard List, a fresh water source, especially one that creates the sound of moving water, can be an attraction and an important source of water. Likewise, a mix of trees and bushes may attract a variety of warblers, vireos, wrens, thrushes, and flycatchers that will forage for caterpillars, small insects, and small spiders among the leaves and branches.
Attracting a Blue Grosbeak to your property may be as simple as allowing some small stands of lawn grow tall and produce seeds. This practice should also attract a variety of finches, buntings, native sparrows, and towhees.
|
Perhaps it’s time to improve your method of keeping your Yard List. We birders tend to be habitual listers – record keepers – and a good Yard List is more than just a list of species; it includes dates and sexes and ages and behaviors – yeah, it’s more of a yard record. But it’s a very useful list, and it becomes more valuable over time as a reference that you can check to predict when species arrive, when they leave, and when to expect them as their season approaches.
A Yard List is pretty standard, and you may also have other lists, as many birders do: A life list, county list, state list, national list, ABA area list, a trip list, day list – there is no end to the different lists some birders keep. It may be a formal list, or it may merely be your memory, but if you’re relying on memory, it’s time to up your game – and you will find it becomes a fun part of your backyard birding experiences.
Although a standard ledger notebook was once the usual mode for keeping records, including Yard Lists, today many birders keep their lists on computer files, and many of these birders keep their list records on eBird, which is the ultimate record keeper for lists of all kinds – Yard Lists included.
If you prefer using your cellphone rather than a laptop or desktop computer, Merlin is the answer to your handheld record keeping efforts on eBird. Merlin is simply an app that you can download on your cellphone that allows you to enter new observations in the field or thereafter, plus it has a great bird identification tool in case you wish to verify an ID, or if you want to learn more about any bird worldwide.
At some point it becomes relatively hard to add new birds to your Yard List; you may only add a couple per year, and you find yourself wondering how to add the next species to your Yard List?
Improve Your Chances
How many species has your yard attracted? Some birds are going to be incidental observations that are merely flyover sightings, or birds that perch within sight for a moment and move on. They’re legitimate yard birds, but it’s always more satisfying when you can point to a new bird food or water feature as the reason for a new bird’s appearance. Likewise, it’s great when a new flower garden, or another new landscaping element produces new bird sightings that you can add to your Yard List.
The landscaping in your yard can provide food sources for birds in the form of flower nectar, berries, nuts, fruits, and seeds. Plants from trees to grasses also create bird foraging areas for small insects, insect larvae, small spiders, and more. Plus your landscaping and gardening efforts provide important cover, shade, roosting sites, nesting locations, and loafing and preening perches.
Improvements to your feeding station can be the easiest way to attract new birds to your yard, especially if something is missing. Let’s review the feeding station checklist of foods: Suet,
hummingbird nectar, grape jelly and cut orange halves, a robust mix of seeds and nut pieces, and fresh water of course – and keep in mind that moving water attracts more species. If you have those bases covered, then it’s worth trying one more special ingredient: You can always resort to the infamous “Bark Butter” that is known to attract 152 different species of birds to date. Bark Butter is a spreadable suet made from a special recipe of ingredients that is only available at Wild Birds Unlimited stores and their online website at WBU.com
Big Benefits
Backyard birding provides many big benefits for you: A little excitement, a little pleasure, and a sense of well-being that adds to good health. By improving your yard for birds, you improve it for yourself, your family, and your neighborhood. You will also tend to keep a closer eye on your property and notice new things to improve little by little over time.
By providing variety and quality in our landscaping, along with a diverse selection of foods at our feeding stations with fresh water, your yard also becomes a great benefit to birds of many species, including neotropic migrants that have been hard pressed to find enough habitat and food along their migration routes. Every birdscaped yard makes a difference; every tree, bush, flowering plant, food source; because collectively, from neighborhood to county, state to state, nation to nation, every bit of habitat makes a difference – every season.
Today, birders like us are making significant improvements in our suburban, urban, and rural properties that are benefiting birds from across the hemisphere that visit our yards – birds from the Arctic tundra, the boreal forests, the mountains and wetlands, the grasslands and deserts, tropical forests and scrublands, even rainforests and cloud forests. It’s exciting to link the birds that visit your yard this fall, with their nesting and wintering areas, as well as their migration stopover sites.
You can learn more about the birds on your Yard List simply by checking out their distribution maps at the Birds of the World website (https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home) and you will find a wealth of information about every bird species on that website. Enjoy the birds that visit your yard, and keep working to add more birds to your Yard List while improving your yard for you, your family, and your neighborhood – and for birds.
P.S. A bonus backyard article about how to photograph hummingbirds at your feeder, is provided in this week’s Bird Photography article near the bottom of this week’s issue of The Birding Wire.
Share your birding experiences and photos at editorstbw2@gmail.com