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Beautiful and Beneficial Gardening for Birds
Native plants let you grow your own food for birds!
© Aaron Maizlish
Buying enough birdseed to keep all your backyard birds satisfied can run up a big bill. Homegrown National Park® co-founder Douglas Tallamy says that growing native plants in your garden can provide a balanced diet for birds. While there’s a misconception that native plants lead to a messy garden, Tallamy explains that native wildflowers, shrubs and trees can provide both splashes of color and nutritious meals for birds.
Homegrown National Park® is a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate diversity and ecosystem function by planting native plants and creating new ecological networks. Learn how to plant native and get on the HNP map here.
BirdNote®
Beautiful and Beneficial Gardening for Birds
Written by Ariana Remmel
This is BirdNote.
A bird feeder is a lovely addition to any yard, attracting beauties like this Rose-breasted Grosbeak:
[Rose-breasted Grosbeak song, ML 84866]
But buying enough birdseed to keep all those birds satisfied can run up a big bill.
Homegrown National Park® co-founder Douglas Tallamy says that growing native plants in your garden can provide a balanced diet for birds.
Douglas Tallamy: I think the most common misconception about native plant gardening is that native plants are messy. They're not neat. They're not manicured, it's wild.
But that’s not necessarily true, he says. The bright petals of native sunflowers provide a pop of color and a nutritious meal for goldfinches and sparrows.
[American Goldfinch song, ML358946521]
And a hedge of native hollies produces fatty berries that draw in fruit-loving birds like thrushes and waxwings.
[Foraging Bohemian Waxwings, ML 284831701]
Tallamy wants to show gardeners that native plants can be a beautiful and functional way to promote biodiversity and feed the birds at home.
Douglas Tallamy: Just the notion that plants are more than decorations, that they have ecological functions, and that native plants perform those functions much better than non-native plants. That's probably the real key there because then people say, ‘okay, my garden is going to be pretty but it’s also going to be functional.’
[Rose-breasted Grosbeak song, ML 84866]
To learn more about Homegrown National Park® and how to take part in their simple grassroots solution to the biodiversity crisis, visit BirdNote dot org. I’m Ariana Remmel.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler. Rose-breasted Grosbeak ML 84866 recorded by W. Hershberger, American Goldfinch ML 358946521 recorded by G. Forsyth, Bohemian Waxwing ML 284831701 recorded by D. Jauvin.
© 2022 BirdNote March 2022 Narrator: Ariana Remmel
ID # hnp-02-2022-03-28 hnp-02
