From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. I always say that birds taught me to garden as I watched their behavior and added more of the plants and features they seem to like and use most. And I've been blessed to have a diversity of avian visitors over many years. One place I've long turned for all kinds of information about birds is Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And lately among their many educational resources, they've added the Garden for Birds project loaded with reference materials and aspiring webinars and more. The project's leader, native plant specialist Beko Rodomsky-Bish of Cornell Lab, is here today to tell us about its offerings and suggest some of the more impactful tactics for making your own landscape into a garden for birds. So more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-size flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Erbil Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com. And by Whiteflower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com. Becca Rodomsky-Bish of Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been gardening for more than 20 years. She draws upon her background in environmental science and her native plant expertise to manage her home garden and shape the offerings of the labs, Garden for Birds Program, which she leads. Like everyone I know who gardens for birds, Becker reports not just an uptick in sightings of feathered visitors, but also in the positive impacts the practice has had on her life, not in consequential effects like hope and joy. I'm so glad to welcome her back to the program. How are you? Thank you, Margaret. I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. Bird lady. It's right. Sister Bird lady, how are you? Very well. Now that the birds are returning, right? They certainly are lots of action out there. So to get us started, I thought of course, give us sort of the short intro of the Stir version of how do you introduce Garden for Birds? What is this project? Yeah, well like you, as you said, I'm very passionate about birds. They are... I would say they really taught me to garden too. I share that thread with you. We know people love birds, right? The Cornell Lab has fortunately been at the frontrunner of that growth of love and Merlin is a tool that many, many people use now. And so at the lab, we understand that birds can be a really powerful hook and a powerful motivator. And so one of the things we've been discussing a lot at the lab is our goal of really trying to get people to take more concrete action in the ways that they can to help birds. And what better way to possibly do that if you have access to any kind of green space is, or even just to porch our patio, is to actually put resources and habitat features out that birds are attracted to and can be safe in and around using and hopefully provides access to resources that they need in order to to go about their very busy, curious, amazing lives. So Garden for Birds is really born out of that. It's born out of how do we use this love of birds that we see growing Really around the world and inspire more and more people to actually take some action to to help those birds because We can that's one of the beauties of this like you said There's a lot of hope and joy in recognizing that we can have a role to play in this space Yeah, and I joined Garden for birds or something that one registers you can register for and I saw that I I'm going to get a this space. And I joined Garden for Birds on something that one registers, you can register for it. And I saw that I'm going to get a monthly newsletter and I sort of clicked around the website and there's all these resources, information. I mentioned in the introduction that there's webinars, both some older ones that are recorded and they're like people from people like Doug Talami and Benjamin Vogue and all kinds of people. You just had a recent one I believe with Heather and Zoe Evans of Design Your Wild who have that substack newsletter and they did sort of a design webinar and I'm going to include that with the trend. I think I'll embed that with the transcript of the show because that was fun that you hosted. Yeah. So there's lots of stuff. How to access plant lists for your region and design ideas, peoples before and after a photo. So lots and lots and lots of stuff. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And really a lot of the, a lot of what you articulated is about sort of helping and supporting people, which though this project is only in its official second year, we've really been doing research to try to launch this project since really 2023. Because a lot of this work is about understanding what people need in order to be able to even engage in this. You and Heather and Zoe and Benjamin and Doug and a lot of us are already deep into this work. But for somebody who's not, who's coming in for the first time and has really good intentions, it can be very confusing and you know, what should I plant? What should I plant? What will work? What won't work, etc. So as much as this project has been about the birds,

it's also about the people,

and trying to understand our audience

and trying to understand what people at different degrees

and levels of expertise and gardening,

what they need in order to engage in this work.

Right.

And I think it connects, like I have,

since there's been Ebert, I've had an Ebert account,

and I put my sightings in and whatever.

And I think I can connect the project

to my E-Bird account as well

if people are E-Birders, is that correct? That is correct. And that's one of the points of this effort that gets into the participatory science piece that we of course are really excited about at the lab because we are all about that.

Doug and many other researchers, Desiree Narono,

we have research on how changes in plant choices in our landscapes and monitoring birds can have an impact on them. On sort of these isolated research projects, but what we would love to be able to do is to make that bigger and say, here are people around the United States and Canada who are a part of a project where they're intentionally creating habitat for birds. And because of that, here's what we're seeing in the bird data as people engage in that work. And so part of the impetus for connecting with the eBird project is to start to collect that data. So if you're birding in your gardens and you do eBird checklists on a regular basis, you can connect your checklists to our project. And we hope over time, I featured one of my favorite examples on our participate page, but we hope over time more and more people can begin to realize that their changes are actually resulting in influencing the types of birds are seen, how many birds they're seeing, etc. over time. Well, and I mean, I can say for 40 years in one place, and look, I didn't know what I was doing. You know, in your web, no internet. I bought a bunch of books and, you know, so forth, and I used to mail to mail you know join feeder watch or whatever I whenever all those programs emerged you know with the lab and you know It's sending you send in your checklist I think on paper as I remember and yeah, it's nail mail And you know what I mean? I'm old exactly I'm under the result so you know I would learn little by little But I can say say for sure that it works because I don't know who told me early on that, you know, certain kinds of birds, really, you know, fruiting shrubs were really good. And I planted 40 winter berries and a lot of our bronies and, you know, elderberries. And I don't know, you know, it's like I, I don't even remember who the person wants to told me that you Joe and right and boy oh boy. Do I every year since the same patterns of the same you know Threat various kinds of thrashes and and the Cedar wax wings and you know the same birds It's like the pit stop for you know pre-migration or during the winter months when you know to see if there's anything left to eat at Margaret You know what it's and I again I anthropomorphize and I make it a joke because that's how it makes me happy It's speaking of joy and hope you know I feel like I want to that kind of kind of connection with them and but it's true. It works. It really works. Yeah Yeah, it really does yeah You you really are you know, I think you articulate this too and a lot of your work, it is, the birds are one of my favorite show-ups, right? When we do this work, but there's just so much other life. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. We're really recreating food webs. That's part of the joy of this effort as we're recreating food webs that have been highly disturbed and in some cases eliminated from our landscapes. Yeah, no, it's really true. It's fascinating. So, if you were going to, from your own 20, however many years of gardening experience and all of your bird experience and your science education and all of it, your career If you were going to say what the things are that have been the most impactful, most powerful, what are some of the things that people need to think about that are going to move the needle, so to speak, for the birds? Yeah, well one thing one I want to say is, no matter how big our properties are, although I suppose if you have an immensely large property, you might be able to sort of be a part of bringing certain bird species back. We recognize that birds are living in these very complex, sometimes migrants or even regional birds travel big distances. So we're not talking about being able to save the birds ourselves, right? But we're talking about being a part of a group of people who can make intentional steps and changes to do better by birds. And so I just want to be careful about that because, of course, the Cornell Lab wants to have huge impact. But as an individual property owner or in our communities, we can have some impact and as you articulate, you're going to see immediate results from that. But in terms of my own experience on my own property and I do have a big piece of land, which is wonderful. I agree with you? I think shrubbery is a missing layer in a lot of landscapes, especially I would say more traditional suburban and urban landscapes. We tend to have trees and we tend to have flower gardens. And there's this middle layer that's incredibly important for a whole wealth of songbirds in particular, for nesting, for foraging, for bees, right? The flowering aspects of shrubs is incredibly important. And anytime you bring in pollinators, you're gonna be supporting birds, right? With their just, you're connected to each other. So I would say investing in a shrub layer, if people don't have that as a part of their landscape is incredibly important. I also think thinking about the safety of birds and the perspective from what birds need in order to feel safe and secure. And so having places that birds can escape to for shelter. Sometimes that shrub, sometimes that's trees, sometimes that's brush piles. Sometimes that's just allowing our landscapes to have kind of a variety of layers and structures to them because different birds will respond and react differently. But ultimately bird safety is right up there with our landscapes. And of course the plants themselves need to be native, right? native habitat is critical for birds. One of the parallels with bird populations that we've seen is this decrease in insect populations and insects need native plants. So the more we're putting natives back into the ground, we're hopefully going to positively impact those insect populations, which will help birds. And then of course, minimizing how much disturbance we're creating to these spaces, right? So if you plant a beautiful garden, you don't want to be applying chemicals and pesticides to manage maybe some ants that you're concerned about kind of getting over populated, right? So it's not just what we put in the ground. It's how we manage it. So minimizing our applications of anything that could get into the food webs and ecosystems of these birds, putting out water, keeping that water clean, cause all birds need water. So you'll get your neighborhood songbirds using that, but you also will get some special visitors who maybe don't come to bird feeders or maybe won't be using some of the native plants. And also protecting our windows, that's another top one. So as a part of work, we're not just talking about the garden landscape. We're talking about how do we create spaces that are safer for birds. And if you have a beautiful native garden right in front of your windows, but that window is not visible to the birds, there's a very good chance they could collide into it. So really thinking bigger picture holistic about birds is kind of where I've spent a lot of my time and where this project is trying to move people. Right. So if you have ants, I recommend getting a flicker as in the woodpecker. Yes. They're really good with ants. They are. They're great ant eaters. They were as hilarious. Yeah. And people might have heard what you said earlier about the shrub layer. They're like, oh, but where am I going to put that? My place is full, whatever. And it's like, if we look at our properties differently, even small, a typical suburban lot, think about that you may be mowing to the edge like right now, or the edge adjacent to a neighbor adjacent to the street, you know, the sidewalk or whatever. It's not really the most used spaces, right? It's not, you know, you probably don't want to put your patio furniture on the 10 feet right before your neighbor's house or 10 feet before the sidewalk. So couldn't that become a shrubbery, right? Couldn't that become that sort of edge habitat, you know, that diverse space? And maybe there's some perennials underneath it, you know, some ground-coverry sort of, you know, wild ginger and ferns and who knows what is underneath, you know, T'erella, whatever, depending on where you live. And suddenly it's like, wow, you gave up a 10-foot strip or a 6-foot wide strip that wasn't really doing anything. Exactly. Have this huge high impact. And when the shrubs, as the example I used earlier, have not just flowers earlier on, but have fruit later. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And I noticed on your property too, and I do it similarly on my property, sometimes even looking in front of, if you do have trees, even if you have an individual tree that's sort of marks your front yard, or perhaps you have a a little bit of a property line just right in front of those shrubs or in front of those trees, shrubs grow really well. Yes. Especially in the Northeast and this is true in many places where shrubbery is common are very relatively shade tolerant. So a lot of them are designed to sort of be next to trees and so then then you start to create this layer right in front of your tree habitat, whether it's a single tree or a line of trees that actually goes a long way to helping birds. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. And you mentioned water and of course I and I shared this with you by email. Yeah. That's an item this morning. You know, I've had this water garden that I made maybe 35 years ago in the backyard. It's not very big. Maybe it's 12 feet long by 6 feet or 7 feet wide, 3 feet deep. In ground, I keep the water on frozen even in the winter. And everybody, I've had everybody, from Bobcats and Bears. And you know, you name it to this last week, a pair of wood ducks.

Now for me and my backyard to have wood ducks, it's ridiculous because I'm not in a watery

habitat.

I'm not in a well and habitat, but they scoped it out and then they came back this morning.

They've been coming back.

So maybe they're nesting at the perimeter.

I don't know. I have to know now I'm going to have to watch and really watch them and see if I can see maybe they're nesting at the perimeter. I don't know.

You know, I have to know I'm going to have to watch

...