Birding Through the Year: July 2022
by David Hoyt
Flora and Fauna: Planting for Birds
In July, birds recede in my mind as they recede into the summer foliage. In their place bloom the dozens of flowers, hundreds of plants, and still greater number of insects that make their homes in our yard. The various bird guides that once sat at the top of the pile now settle to the bottom, beneath field guides to native plants, insects, butterflies and moths, caterpillars, trees, and a few tomes of botany.
My amateur ornithology has, for a time, been displaced by amateur botany. Instead of drilling my ear to the songs and calls of warblers and thrushes, I review the Latin nomenclature of various forbs and grasses. It seems natural to study what is most immediate to the senses, and in July, it is the vegetal world. They are all bound together by evolution and ecology, of course, and to study one is to enhance understanding of the other. But I notice a division of interests and expertise. There seem to be bird people, and plant people: the ecological gardener who appreciatively inspects the yard, and yet is unfamiliar with the birds that dwell there. John James Audubon, who had other people fill in the plants in his bird paintings. Gardening for birds is one way to bridge this divide.
Geeking out on plants doesn’t mean I’ve stopped paying attention to birds. I’m just paying attention to them in a different way. Many of the sightings I make in July are what eBird would classify as incidental, which is a scientific euphemism for not that helpful. But these sightings are often the most personally meaningful and the most exciting. The pair of Pileated Woodpeckers that casually flew a few feet past the front porch of the cabin in Michigan one morning; the single Eastern Meadowlark that rose—in glorious defiance of glyphosate—from a field of soybeans far out along the backroads of central Illinois.
In July, I’m thinking less about what birds I can spot than about what birds need from me, and what that requirement has in common with the needs of the other organisms that share our small encampment. The answers to that question have turned me to native gardening, or what, in momentary delusions of grandeur, I fancy to be full-scale habitat restoration. The time I spend outdoors has been redirected from seeking out birds someplace else, to building a home for them where I live.
When I began, I never imagined that our front yard would become a field of black-eyed Susans nodding to joggers and dogwalkers and landscaping crews driving by in their Ford F150s. The previous October some friends helped me strip the sod, leaving that holy space of American residential life a bare rectangle of unadorned soil. In November, I broadcast a short prairie seed mix, and then worried all winter that most of the seeds would be blown by winter winds into either neighboring yards or southern Wisconsin.
July was critical. By then, we would know whether our experiment was to yield bare earth, a profusion of weeds, or the beginnings of a prairie. Our previous native plantings were either in the backyard, or smaller and hugging the foundation of the house. This was different: our yard is visible, in the middle of the block, on a street that kids use to walk to school, and traveled by everything from funeral processions to holiday parades. There could be no way of hiding what was going on. We would either tip our reputation to the “nice people with a butterfly garden” or the “crazy people who need to mow their lawn” side of the scale.
By early July, our trust in the seeds was repaid with a profusion of black-eyed Susans, beneath which seedlings of a dozen other species were emerging. Most surprising of these has been the rose milkweed, which is not only growing in quantity, but blooming in its first year, to the delight of the cohort of butterflies that visit daily. The butterflies are the most easily measured index of change. There are simply more of them—monarchs, swallowtails, azures, and sulphurs—but also new ones. The day I spotted a great spangled fritillary—new to me, and new to the yard—was no less a joyful discovery than my encounter with the two Pileated Woodpeckers.
Will any of this really make any difference for birds? Sometimes I wonder. I don’t expect to find a meadowlark nesting in the little bluestem, or a grassland sparrow. But there are discernable changes. Backyard birds that simply traversed our yard before now appear to more fully live in it. There are more fragments of robin eggs on the ground. I flush goldfinches from stands of echinacea when I open the front door in the morning. They perch on the stems of taller plants with the House Sparrows, wondering what took so long for us to get the memo. Mating pairs of cardinals hop along the ground foraging, instead of remaining in neighboring trees, and chickadees call along the fence line. The single hummingbird from last year now has a family.
In the big picture, this is a very small effort to expand natural habitat for birds and other wildlife. But together with the preservation of larger areas, and the aggregation of many similar, smaller efforts, I think it can make a positive difference. In the fall or spring, when I see how a Carolina Wren uses the golden alexander for cover, a female Common Yellowthroat lingers a few days to forage beneath the prairie dropseed, or a monarch feeds on goldenrod in early October, I realize how important even the smallest area of natural habitat can be for migrating birds, resident birds, and animals of all kinds.