Turn your garden into habitat for birds
When planting to attract birds, it’s crucial to include a variety of vegetation layers and species. Different birds have distinct needs: scrubwrens forage on the ground, brown thornbills inhabit mid-level shrubs, and parrots prefer trees. Dense vegetation is essential for many species, providing food, water, shelter, and breeding sites.
Key Planting Strategies:
Variety
Provide diverse vegetation to cater to various bird species. For example, fairy-wrens forage on lawns but need dense shrubs or branch piles for predator shelter and nest-building materials. By providing variety you can satisfy every bird’s needs.
Large Trees
These act as urban stepping stones, offering rest stops in urban environments. Even non-native trees can be valuable. Imagine you’re a bird flying through the suburbs – how would you traverse the sea of roofs and roads? While a large eucalypt may not be appropriate in a small garden, there are small ones that attract pardalotes and honeyeaters. Other smaller trees, such as wattles, banksias and she-oaks provide excellent habitat and food.
Native Plants
Favour local or non-invasive Australian natives. While exotic plants offer shelter and nectar, they often attract only versatile species like New Holland honeyeaters. Native plants support more specialised birds by hosting more native insects, increasing availability of bird food.
Balanced Planting
Avoid overusing “bird-attracting” plants like callistemons and hybrid grevilleas. While they will attract wattlebirds, noisy miners and New Holland honeyeaters, these species will aggressively defend their patch. A seven-gram thornbill doesn’t stand much chance against a 200-gram wattlebird or a mob of noisy miners. Ironically, too many nectar-abundant plants can leave small birds completely excluded.
Using fewer of the showy species mixed with shelter-providing shrubs and other kinds of insect-attracting flowers will produce a greater variety of feathered friends in your yard. Smaller flowers, like common heath (Epacris impressa) and winter-flowering common correa (Correa reflexa) will attract smaller eastern spinebills, while wattles, tea trees, prickly box (Bursaria spinosa), daisy bushes and bushpeas are a safe bet for enticing insects.
Dead Branches
If safe, retain some dead branches. Eagles, blackfaced cuckoo-shrikes and dusky woodswallows use these to study their surrounds before they hunt. Robins also need a perch from which they can pounce on small invertebrates below – another good reason to keep woody debris lying around instead of ‘tidying up’.
Fruit and Seeds
Fruit-eating birds, such as silvereyes, will appreciate plants like native currants (Coprosma quadrifida) as well as any fruit in your orchard (my fig tree produces enough for them and us). Make sure you don’t have any environmental weeds with berries in your garden, such as holly, elder, arum lily or hawthorn, as birds may eat the berries and spread them into local bushland. Native grasses provide seeds for firetails and some parrots such as eastern rosellas, as well as fine foliage for many species to use in their nests, or nest in.
The joy of seeing and listening to birds at home is surely one of the best reasons to have a garden at all. By planting for a range of species, you can foster birds in your backyard and help populations in your local area.
