A while ago I wrote an article for the Friends School Plant Sale on gardening for birds. I still stand behind everything I said: plant fruit-bearing trees and shrubs, add a water feature, be messy, keep your cat indoors. But I remember at the time thinking that I was being a little short on specifics. What trees and shrubs? What kind of water setup? And which birds are we talking about anyway?

I recently stumbled across a book, Bird by Bird Gardening by Sally Roth (Rodale, 2006), that goes a long way (371 pages, in fact) toward answering those questions. (See the Rodale website for purchase information.)

Clematis along the front fence

Bird by Bird Gardening is fun, opinionated, and full of specifics. Sally’s basic premise is that you can tailor your garden to individual families of birds by understanding their habits and needs: food, water, shelter. She defines families both tightly (thrushes, vireos, woodpeckers) and loosely (large finches, small finches).

The bulk of the book is taken up by long chapters devoted to each of 19 individual families of birds. Each chapter includes habitat needs, dietary issues, feeder strategies, suggested plants (including named varieties), and even tentative garden design.

The 19 families generally are those that you would expect to find in back yards: smaller feeder-visiting birds that come and stay for a while. She does not, for example, include raptors, probably because raptor habits tend more toward feeding on the visitors than on the feed. (One exception: when I lived in Alaska, my nearest neighbors had an eagle feeder, a large piece of plywood raised high off the ground on which they placed slabs of old meat. This is not recommended locally.) Sally concentrates on appealing to birds that use the big four food groups: insects, seeds and nuts, fruits and berries, and nectar.

I have a pretty good garden for birds. My backyard bird list is approaching 100 species. I have mature trees, no grass, I never use pesticides, and I am not the neatest. As I write this in early March with 28 inches of snow on the ground, I see goldfinches, juncos, mourning doves, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, a brown creeper and cardinals. But what I really, really want is a resident Carolina wren. I have nesting house wrens every summer, I see winter wrens on migration in most years, I will never have a sedge or a marsh wren (no sedge and no marsh)—but a Carolina wren is well within the range of possible.

Although they are generally considered to be eastern and southeastern birds, Carolina wrens are seen regularly in Rochester and along the Minnesota River valley, and a trio just showed up in a yard in Golden Valley. So I consulted the wren section of Bird by Bird Gardening, and I am going to make a few changes. I am going to plant a grape vine, some prickly pears, and a serviceberry. I am going to look hard at hollyhocks, Malva, Asclepias, and autumn flowering Clematis. I might try to get over my aversion to mealworms. I am going to put up a wren house, and I am never going to rake again. And I will let you know.

We can all make changes that make our yards more bird-friendly. Sally is opposed to naked fencing as “good for privacy but…bad for birds.” A fence that is covered with vines, though, is an asset for both; Sally advocates virgin’s bower, hops, grapes, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, and wisteria. Royal ferns and serviceberries for chickadees; pussy willows, goldenrods and hibiscus for warblers; columbines and Falling Stars (Crocosmia) for hummingbirds: every plant I have mentioned is available at the plant sale.

This book contains an enormous amount of information, so if you love looking out your window and seeing a flash of something unfamiliar or if you just want to give back something to creatures from whom so much is being taken, grab a copy of Bird by Bird Gardening. As Sally says, “Gardening and bird feeding…have big effects on birds.” Let’s work to make our homes and our communities safe havens for birds.

Sidebar: Multipurpose Plants

Most of us don’t have a single bird family that we are interested in but, rather, garden for birds in general. Sally includes a list of “multipurpose plants,” ones that attract more than one family:

  • Bayberry
  • Blackberries
  • Blueberries
  • Cherries
  • Dogwoods
  • Elderberries
  • Grapes
  • Maples
  • Pines
  • Prickly pear
  • Raspberries
  • Sunflowers
  • Willows
  • Zinnias