Sept. 22 Column: Attracting Birds to the Garden

Aren’t birds just the coolest creatures around? As avid birdwatchers, my husband and I made it an early priority to landscape with the idea of attracting birds to our garden. That’s the topic of today’s garden column, which you can read in The Spokesman-Review: Planting for the birds reaps many rewards.

As I mention in my column, we have counted over 90 different species of birds that come for a visit to our garden. And they often nest here as well. A couple of years ago, I created a “Birds in the Garden” guide, which includes profiles of the birds we’ve been observing.

I hope both my column and the guide will give you ideas of ways to attract birds to your own garden. They are such a joy to watch and many of them eat insects so they can be your allies in the garden. That’s a win-win situation, right?

The bird in the photo above is a male Western bluebird. They are insectivorous and extremely successful at hunting insects, so they’re one of my favorite residents during the spring and summer months. The photo at the very top of this post is of one of our American cranberry bushes (Viburnum trilobum). They are a fantastic shrub that the birds adore in the winter.

And just in case you never saw this photo on my Facebook page a while back, here is Bill feeding a Calliope hummingbird with a miniature feeder. Is this cool or what?!

For this week’s “Everyone Can Grow a Garden” video, I felt it would be helpful to continue the bird theme by actually showing you what we’ve done in our own landscape and examples of many of the trees and shrubs we chose. I hope you’ll enjoy it: