I like the recommendations at the end of the article: plant native flowers, don’t use pesticides, and contribute to the science with eBird.
Lots of the smaller birds require so many bugs! Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope details some research on this.
I wonder if my experience below could apply to birds as well as small rodents:
For a short while, I was in the no-raking camp because I had read that leaves on the ground provide protection for insects and their eggs throughout the winter.
In a basic suburban American neighborhood, however, there is pressure to keep up with the Jonses and that includes keeping lawns clean. So, a guy who had previously done some landscaping for me shows up and I cave and have him remove all the leaves.
Within hours, the squirrels were having a field day! With the leaf cover gone, they could get to the insects and nuts in the ground.
So, I wonder about birds. Would they benefit from getting to food sources in deep fall after leaf removal, or would they benefit more from having those same insects emerge in the spring from unraked leaf cover?
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Blue Jays are gone here. None since early fall.
I like the recommendations at the end of the article: plant native flowers, don’t use pesticides, and contribute to the science with eBird.
Lots of the smaller birds require so many bugs! Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope details some research on this.
I wonder if my experience below could apply to birds as well as small rodents:
For a short while, I was in the no-raking camp because I had read that leaves on the ground provide protection for insects and their eggs throughout the winter.
In a basic suburban American neighborhood, however, there is pressure to keep up with the Jonses and that includes keeping lawns clean. So, a guy who had previously done some landscaping for me shows up and I cave and have him remove all the leaves.
Within hours, the squirrels were having a field day! With the leaf cover gone, they could get to the insects and nuts in the ground.
So, I wonder about birds. Would they benefit from getting to food sources in deep fall after leaf removal, or would they benefit more from having those same insects emerge in the spring from unraked leaf cover?