For millions of Americans, attracting songbirds to the yard is a pleasurable and satisfying hobby. Most folks feed and water birds because they enjoy the beauty and activity the songbirds bring to the landscape.
Here at Yardener.com, we have a somewhat different view of this pheonomenon. Songbirds are intersting and beautiful, and they certainly are fun to watch, but that is not why we go to some considerable trouble to attract as many songibrds to our yard as we can. The reason? Songbirds, if in sufficient numbers and species, will control over 50% of the pest insects in the entire home landscape!!! That is why we want to attract birds to our yard.
This section of Yardener's Helper gets into practical details about how to have a large and varied population of songbirds in your yard 365 days a year. In doing so we certainly improve the quality of life in our yard, but as important, we reduce the need to use pesticides to control bad insects and we like that idea.
I got interested in songbirds, often called “bird watching”, about the same time I got interested in gardening. Yes, I was a “vegetable gardener” before I discovered the “yardener” in me some years later. It is probably relevant to also note that at about that same time I got interested in serious bass fishing. Looking back I guess it would be pretty hard to be a serious gardener and a serious fisher person and not start noticing the birds.
IN YARDENER'S TOOL SHED THERE ARE ABOUT EVERY KIND OF PRODUCT RELATED TO ATTRACTING A MAXIMUM NUMBER OF SONGBIRDS TO YOUR YARD YEAR LONG. YOU CAN START HERE.