Category Archives: Backyard Birding

Turning Useless Lawn into Vital Habitat

4 Replies

As the winter chill wears off, many of us are anticipating how we can spiff up our yards. That can be a tall order when we’ve inherited a landscape of sterile lawns and imported ornamental plants that have no business growing in Montana—or, most likely, wherever else you happen to live. Fortunately, this situation presents us with a wonderful opportunity to bolster the native ecosystems we know and love. How? By replacing exotic species with native plants that are both beautiful and provide real value to birds, insects, and other native wildlife.

Our blue penstemon and other flowering plants feed a host of native insects, including a variety of bumblebees.

A Scientific American article titled “The American Obsession with Lawns,” points out that lawns began sprouting up in America in the nineteenth century. They were an attempt to emulate trendier Europeans and, more important, to display wealth and status. Fast forward to today, and a house doesn’t seem complete without its neatly-mowed spread of Kentucky bluegrass. Unfortunately, our obsession with lawns comes with a host of problems.

As you can see, we aren’t purists. Here, native mock orange (white flowers), snowberry, and fireweed thrive amid California poppies and some kind of honeysuckle I can’t recall the name of!

Especially in the West, lawns gobble up water that we can scarcely afford. Just how much depends on location and other factors, but keeping a lawn alive can devour between 15 and 75% of a family’s household water consumption. Keeping those lawns green and pristine-looking also can be expensive, especially factoring in the gas and electricity required to run lawnmowers, and the fertilizers and herbicides to keep lawns green and weed-free. Speaking of “weed-free,” despite industry claims that herbicides and other garden chemicals are safe, I am skeptical. Do you really want to be dumping things into the soil that may persist for decades and have unknown long-term health risks. I don’t—especially when my yard sits only twenty feet above the aquifer that I and the rest of my community depends on for drinking water.

Despite industry claims, I don’t think we’ll know the full impacts of a lot of chemicals for years. Unless we want to keep repeating chemical disasters, it seems prudent to avoid commercial herbicides and insecticides whenever possible. Replacing at least a bit of your lawn with native plants is a great way to do that.

All that said, my biggest beef with imported lawns and plants is that they have needlessly transformed productive habitat into sterile expanses with almost no useful function. Sure, a lawn is great for kids to play on—we keep a patch of it ourselves—but our grass obsessions have come at an extreme cost to wildlife, especially to native insects and birds. Many of you have probably heard the shocking statistics that America has lost one quarter of its breeding birds in the short space of fifty years. There are many causes for this, but habitat loss probably ranks at the top. While much of this loss may have been unavoidable, in the case of our lawns, it is not.

Even common, beloved birds have seen dramatic declines in the past fifty years, and habitat loss is often a culprit. Yards filled with native plants can be a major step in reversing this trend. (This is a newly-fledged Black-capped Chickadee sitting in one of our mock orange plants.)

Author Douglas Tallamy (Nature’s Best Hope) points out that 40 million acres of our nation’s natural habitats have been converted to turfgrass—an area about 42% the size of Montana! If we “turf owners” convert just half of our lawns to native habitat, it will restore an area larger than the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. Talk about your game changer!

One great thing about native plants is that once you put a few in, they find where else they want to be. This patch of beebalm came up totally on its own—much to the delight of honey bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. (Golden currant in the background, angling up to the right.)

Fortunately, converting your yard to native plants is fairly easy to do. A simple online search reveals nurseries that offer native plants all over our state (also check your native plant society—see below). You don’t have to create your own “national park” all at once. Just dig up a strip of your present lawn and put in some native shrubs. Here in Montana, you’ll want to stick to deer-resistant plants such buffaloberry, juniper, or maple sumac—or better yet, protect plants with fencing until they grow large enough to thwart deer. Before planting trees, think about how big that tree is going to be in fifty or one hundred years—and plant it in an appropriate spot. If you live in a fire area, you’ll want to make sure you keep a defensible space around your house, too.

Native plants don’t just “grow” native insects. Many provide fruit and seeds for birds, as this berry-laden serviceberry branch shows.

Incorporating native plants into your yard brings immediate rewards. Our modest native plantings attract chickadees, juncos, wrens, kinglets, and other native birds, many of them feeding on the insects that the plants produce. Why not join the fun? You’ll discover a whole new aspect of gardening, and take satisfaction in helping the wildlife we hold dear.

This House Wren and its mate successfully raised a batch of youngsters in our yard last summer. At times, the pair were bringing caterpillars and other insects to their chicks every two or three minutes! To my satisfaction, I watched them grab most of these insects right off of the native plants in our yard!

Sneed’s Favorite Native Plants for the Yard That Don’t Need Deer Protection: buffaloberry, maple sumac, juniper, mountain mahogany, chocolate coneflower, yellow coneflower, Oregon grape, pussytoes.

Sneed’s Favorite Native Plants That Do Need Deer Protection (at least until they grow larger): golden currant, beebalm, burr oak, purple coneflower, mock orange, aspen, rabbitbrush, serviceberry, cottonwood (need a LARGE space).

A Word of Advice: Never, EVER plant any grasses unless you really know what you’re doing. Even native grasses can quickly get out of hand—as I have learned the hard way.

To find out sources of native plants and seeds, check the website of the Montana Native Plant Society. They have lists of resources for every part of the state! If you don’t live in Montana, you probably have your own native plant society you can look up! Here in Missoula, another great resource is Watershed Consulting, which has a wonderful native plant nursery. You can get their list via:

Website: www.mtnativeplants.com; Email:  hello@mtnativeplants.com; Andy Martinez, manager: 406.529.7746

If you can’t find a good source of native plants near you, call up the wonderful Audubon native plant database. There you can just enter your zip code and begin finding the best plants to put in near you. Even better, you can purchase the plants directly from the website.

For another great, and more detailed post, about transforming your yard into habitat, check out Shane Sater’s excellent post on his “Wild for Nature” website!

All “Cooped” Up!

5 Replies

Today, we take a break from Braden’s High Sierra adventures to explore how we all bird through the summer doldrums. Here I share a surprising discovery right in my own neighborhood. If you subscribe to FSB, please share your own similar story, and if you don’t subscribe—what are you waiting for? We only sell your information to people who will give us a LOT of money (just kidding; we do not share any of this information). So please fill out the box down to the right—and make sure you receive every “episode”.

How are you spending the summer birding doldrums? When we first started, Braden and I pretty much stopped birding during July and August—until we learned that there are still many birds to be had during the Dog Days! Even though it’s still summer, some shorebirds are already making their way south from their Arctic breeding grounds and can show up almost anywhere. Last summer, Braden and Nick Ramsey joined a bunch of other stellar birders for an epic day at Glacier National Park—and, of course, this summer Braden is birding the heck out of California. As for me, I am simply enjoying the ordinary birds around Missoula, trying to sharpen my skills so I can distinguish the call of a Lazuli Bunting from that of a Yellow Warbler! Experienced birders know, however, that even “ordinary birding” can produce extraordinary results.

Even during the Summer Blahs, an occasional bird will fly out for a photo-op! Thank you, Mr. Lazuli Bunting!

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take our dog Lola on an early walk around Greenough Park to beat the heat. For those of you familiar with Greenough, Lola and I parked in the lot midway up the east side of the park, and crossed the two pedestrian bridges so that we could begin walking clockwise around the park—and better spot any caffeine-crazed bicyclists barreling down on us. Sure enough, after only a hundred yards on the main path, a large, crazed shape came right at us. But it wasn’t a bicycle. It was a bird—and it zoomed a mere ten feet above my head! On instinct, I spun around and chased after it, hoping for a solid ID before it disappeared. To my surprise, the bird swooped up into a tree only fifty meters away.

Even while not actively hanging with the chicks, at least one Cooper’s Hawk parent never perched far away.

By this time, I had 99% concluded that this was a Cooper’s Hawk—a kind of accipiter especially adapted for catching birds and flying through trees. According to Birds of the World, 47 species of accipiters live on the planet, but here in the U.S. we have only three: the smaller Sharp-shinned Hawk or “Sharpie”; the larger Cooper’s Hawk or “Coop”; and the Northern Goshawk, our largest accipiter and the bird Braden is chasing around the Sierras this summer. Braden and I don’t often get good looks at Coops so I hoped that this one would stay in the tree long enough for me to observe it. It did—and the reason startled me. In a pine next to the busy path, the Cooper’s Hawk couple had built a nest! Even better, the nest had babies!

During my second visit to the Coop nest, the babies generally kept their heads down—save for this guy. Want to bet s/he is first out of the nest?

I, of course, hadn’t brought my camera with me, but in a way that was better because it allowed me to observe the action without worrying about getting a good photo. Speaking of action, I forgot to mention that when the adult flew by me it had been carrying prey—something large and furry, maybe a rabbit. As I watched, the adult started butchering this critter and feeding it to the ravenous chicks. And speaking of chicks, I was amazed to see four of them—and all quite large. Later, I learned that this is not unusual, and a pair will sometimes raise even more, a testament to the hard-working parents. In fact, even though first-year mortality runs fairly high, Cooper’s Hawks seem to have an excellent survival rate as adults and have been known to breed up through twelve years of age.

Incoming! On my third visit, I just loved watching the young Coops testing out their flying abilities—even if they did occasionally land on each other!

Since discovering the nest, I’ve returned two more times, and each time the babies had made marked progress. My last visit, I watched them hopping in and out of the nest, testing their wings for a departure that couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks away. They also were quickly filling out their juvenile coloration, transforming from white fuzz balls to serious-looking predators before my eyes. At least one parent, though, was never far away.

Ready for launch? Pretty darned close. Observing the Coop nest made me realize that the young have blue eyes! How’s that for a blue-eyed baby?

It all just goes to show that even when we think birding is dead, there’s a lot going on. We just have to keep getting out there and paying attention. Who knows? You may have a Cooper’s nest in your backyard right now! Coops are famously adaptable and found in every region of the Lower 48, often in urban environments and often all year-round. In fact, their numbers have increased dramatically in the past half-century—a nice success story in a time when so many birds are in trouble.

Battling the February Birding Blahs

13 Replies

In a recent Redpolling poll, voters overwhelmingly chose February as the worst month for birding (except for a few cheeky Floridians who lorded it over the rest of us). But is February really that bad? In Montana, after all, you can go find some wonderful winter residents such as Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Shrikes, and Snow Buntings. On the other hand, by February you’ve usually seen those already so where does that leave you?

February is a great month to catch up on bird-related reading. For my review on this and other excellent titles, Follow @sneedcollard on Instagram.

For me personally, February is a time to get a lot of actual WORK done such as writing birding articles, banging out new children’s books, writing letters to the editor and my senators about bird conservation, and reading bird books. That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m not curious about which birds are around—while remaining optimistic that I’ll find some surprises if I go out. On a morning dog walk recently, for example, a Northern Goshawk flew right over me and Lola! This last Sunday morning, Lola and I again headed out wondering if we might see any other surprises.

Just to prove that in birding you never know—even in February—a Northern Goshawk flew right over me and my dog Lola only a couple of weeks ago! It was the first I’d ever seen on my own.

We decided to do a loop I only rarely traverse anymore, through a private neighborhood that COULD be great bird habitat but has instead been landscaped with acres of lawn and over-pruned trees. Still, even before we got to that neighborhood, I noticed that our resident birds have shifted into courtship mode. On Valentine’s Day I heard the first two-note song of a chickadee for the year and also the first throaty warble of an advertising Northern Flicker. This morning, I heard both of those—plus an amazing number of Song Sparrows also advertising. I haven’t kept track of “first spring calls” before, but I wondered if they are on a trend toward “springing out” earlier and earlier every year?

After not hearing a Song Sparrow call for many weeks, I was gratified to hear four of them singing in different locations on our recent Sunday morning walk!

In the private neighborhood itself, we heard some distant wild turkeys, a Red Crossbill, and an unknown high-pitched cacophony. My hearing is so sucky anymore I couldn’t tell who was making this chattering, but whipped out Merlin’s Sound ID, which ID’ed them as Pine Siskins. But where were they? I walked forward a bit, turned around and there they were—more than forty of them in a tree! Okay, so it wasn’t a Northern Pygmy-Owl, but I was still happy. Lola and I had headed out expecting maybe 6 or 8 species and ended up with sixteen! Just goes to show you that, even in the February Blahs, birds are around and ready to teach us new things.

A flock of 40 Pine Siskins proved a delightful highlight of our unlikely February neighborhood walk.

Best Fall Warbler Flock Ever!

Leave a reply

After a couple of slightly disappointing birding outings in a row, Braden and I were feeling a little down, especially because we felt like we’d missed our chances to see some uncommon fall migrants as they make their all-too-brief passages through Montana. Nonetheless, I continued taking my binoculars with me on my morning dog walks just to keep an eye on things and learn more about how fall birds behave. Early last Sunday, I decided to take Lola on one of our Top Secret routes—places we can’t tell you about or we’d have to kill you—and had just started down a street near Pineview Park when I saw activity in weird poplar-type trees up ahead. I unslung my binocs and focused.

You Californians are probably used to this, but sixty Yellow-rumped Warblers in Montana? Almost unheard of!

I saw about eight or ten little birds, and the first two I identified happened to be Ruby-crowned Kinglets, so I at first assumed they were all kinglets. Rookie mistake. Upon further study, I realized that many of them were Yellow-rumped Warblers (Banding Code: YRWA). What’s more, many more birds filled the surrounding trees. “Hm . . . This could be serious,” I thought and settled in for a better look. For the next twenty minutes, I did my best to identify the frantically-moving targets, finding Red-breasted Nuthatches, Black-capped Chickadees, Evening Grosbeaks—and about twenty Yellow-rumped Warblers. As I was looking at the top of a spruce tree, however, a shocking black-and-yellow face suddenly popped up: a Townsend’s Warbler! By now, TOWAs were supposed to be long gone and when I punched it into eBird, well, the app flagged it as RARE.

Anyone know what this tree is? Whatever it is, it apparently hosted a lot of insects because the birds loved it!

Lola and I hurried home and woke Braden. “You don’t have to come,” I told him, “but there’s an amazing mixed-species flock down by Pineview, including a Townsend’s Warbler.” Five minutes later, cameras and binoculars in hand, we zoomed down there in our ’86 4-Runner. To our relief, the birds hadn’t left, and we spent the next seventy minutes following them. My major goal was for Braden to see the Townsend’s, but together, we soon began making other discoveries. For one thing, there weren’t just twenty YRWAs. There were at least sixty of them, along with at least ten Ruby-crowned Kinglets. It wasn’t long before Braden found a Wilson’s Warbler and we both began detecting an occasional Orange-crowned in the crowd. Thanks to Braden’s ears, we also heard Pine Siskins, Red Crossbills, a Song Sparrow—even a pair of Sandhill Cranes in the distance!

Full Disclosure: I still confuse Cassin’s Vireos with Ruby-crowned Kinglets. The white “spectacles” are the key to IDing the Cassin’s.

Not to be outdone, vireos made an appearance. Braden spotted a pair of one of our favorite songbirds, Cassin’s Vireo, while I saw another surprise bird face, that of a Warbling Vireo—also flagged as RARE for this time of year.

The species kept piling up with Hairy Woodpecker, flickers, and another surprise, Red-naped Sapsucker. But where was that sneaky Townsend’s Warbler? Had I been imagining it? Had it struck out on its own? Finally, after almost an hour, Braden shouted, “I’ve got the Townsend’s!” I hurried over and sure enough, there it was. I even managed a poor, but unmistakable, photo of it. As the flock made its way slowly down Rattlesnake Creek, Braden and I climbed back into the 4-Runner. “Wow,” I said, “I think that’s the best mixed-species flock we’ve ever seen in Montana!” After some thought, Braden agreed. It hadn’t provided us any Year Birds or Lifers, but had been something we would never forget—and almost in our back yard. Birding doesn’t get better than that.

Click here for our complete list: https://ebird.org/checklist/S74123665

Townsend’s Warblers are supposed to be long gone by now, but this one apparently liked traveling with the YRWA herd!

Remote Educational Resources for Birds and Birding

1 Reply

Instead of our usual post this week, we’d like to share some home educational resources we’ve created to help teachers, parents, and kids keep teaching and learning. These can be found on Sneed’s Youtube Channel. Please share this post with as many people as you can think of. We thank you and hope you are staying safe!

Hello everyone! We hope that you are surviving the lockdown through these crazy, unprecedented times. Braden and I send our sympathies to everyone struggling right now, which we know includes a huge portion of humanity. We do recognize some silver linings to the situation, though, including more time with family, rethinking how we’ve chosen to live in the world, and the opportunity to help those around us.

Ultimately, of course, our success as a society depends on education more than anything and we asked ourselves, “What can we do to help?” We decided to put together some videos about birds and birding. Instead of posting a regular blog this week, we’d like to share these resources with you. They include three videos which can be found on Sneed’s Youtube Channel.

The first is an entertaining virtual version of one of the author visit talks I give when I visit schools in person. This one focuses on our trip to the Galápagos Islands and especially goes along with my book One Iguana, Two Iguanas: A Story of Accident, Natural Selection and Evolution.

The second is a short video of me just reading aloud my book Birds of Every Color. It’s perfect for young kids to watch—and as a great follow-up birding and adaptations study activity. And yes, I will forgive you if you think my voice sounds like Mr. Rogers!

The third video, which Braden and I are perhaps most proud of, is “Birding Basics with Sneed and Braden Collard.” This video helps get young people excited about birding, shows them what they need to begin, and introduces many common birds that can be seen almost anywhere in North America. Even better, I have put together a study guide and lesson plan that can be downloaded from my website.

We hope that you find these resources useful, and ask you to please share the links with everyone you know: teachers, parents, librarians, anyone. Even better, ask them to share. We do not have 50,000 YouTube and Twitter Followers to help get the word out, so depend on the word-of-mouth from people like you.

Since this is a very different post for us, we’re going to leave you with a very different picture: a short-tailed weasel I encountered while hiking recently—a hike I wouldn’t have taken without the lockdown. It helps show you that while many things change, other things stay the same—including the simple message: keep getting out into nature!

Many people are noting that wildlife seems more common since the lockdown. Less noise may be luring animals closer—but it also could be that we’re just paying better attention!