Birds and Garden Pest Control
Birds should be considered principle allies with the gardener, within his or her efforts to manage pest insects that affect the garden plants. Put simply, the more birds that visit a garden, either as permanent inhabitants, or as temporary sojourners on their migratory path, the less the infestations of pest organisms.
It has been estimated that a bird and her mate, that nest twice annually, parenting about 10 chicks, eat the extraordinary volume of some 150 pounds of bugs, like aphids, eggs, and caterpillars. That translates numerically into millions of bugs. However, not all birds are mostly insectivores, but a majority of species feed on bugs at those times in the year when supplemental sources of protein are essential.
Birds won’t entirely eradicate pest pests from the garden. Actually, it is undesirable that they do so, because eradication isn’t the aim of intelligent pest management. Instead, the goal of the gardener generally should be to limit the population of pest and disease organisms to the point that the damage they inflict is tolerable.
There are two main reasons why this somewhat modest approach to pest control is the more normally accepted one today, as opposed to the more conventional approach based on the use of pesticides. Firstly, it is impossible to eradicate the insects for long. Applying insecticides is always short term, as many insect species produce over 20 generations in a year.
Meanwhile, the pesticides may eliminate predatory and parasitic bugs that themselves control the pest populations. Further, birds and other wildlife escape from an environment swimming in pesticides, resulting in less restraint on the bugs in the future generations. Conversely, while there are a wide range of active steps to attract birds to the garden, such as providing food, and water for drinking and bathing, the most important method is to desist from applying pesticides, other than in the most extreme circumstances. It’s best therefore not to see bugs as enemies, but rather as a important source of food for birds.
It could be suggested that a number of birds themselves may be regarded as pests. In fact, there’s hardly a species at all that directly damages plants. Including the woodpecker is only seeking bark bugs and really reduces the amount of these damaging pests.
The issue surrounds fruit trees and other crop plants, which a number of birds may well eat at specific periods of the year. This nevertheless, isn’t a good reason for discouraging birds to visit the garden. The solution is to protect the fruit by such means as nets or ideally by utilizing decoy plants.
For this reason, as large a number and selection as you can of fruit bearing plants generally should be incorporated in the garden plan. The thought isn’t to provide fruit for humans, but rather for the birds, therefore preserving a large amount of the desirable fruit from being nibbled by the birds. Examples include species of hackberry, juniper, oak, berberis, cotoneaster, pyracantha, viburnum and more.