Fruit for Birds

Littlehip haw (Crataegus spathulata) in flower

 I am carefully building my native plant "forest" in the backyard to support birds. As I've written previously in this blog (and in my wildlife landscaping book), a landscape for birds requires us to consider a much broader look at what constitutes food other than invertebrates. Though it is true that the vast majority of songbirds feed their young almost exclusively on invertebrates, it also is true that most switch their diet to one largely based on fruit and seeds during the winter - and a large percentage of songbirds that overwinter in my area are not here during the nesting season. Because of that, I actually have more species of birds dependent on my seeds and fruit than I have on my invertebrates.
In the winter, there are very few active invertebrates in my landscape. For the most part, butterflies and moths are lying low and waiting for spring to come. If they are overwintering as a caterpillar or pupa, they are hiding beneath the bark of shaggy trees, like pines, or in the leaf litter. Some of my birds look for these and so I mulch all of my woodland plantings with leaves. My neighbors have a few of the requisite mature trees with shaggy and/or fissured bark. None of my planted trees are old enough to be a factor yet.

Littlehip haw in fruit

 

 

What I have largely built my developing woodland on are trees that will provide fruit - especially in the late fall through winter when most other fruit has already been eaten or fallen to the ground.  I have, for example, added 2 littlehip haws (Crataegus spathulata) because this species exemplifies all of the attributes I've found to be most significant. Littlehip haw produces thousands of blooms in the spring and these fuel the needs of a great many pollinators. When pollination is good, each turns into a bright red "hip" in the fall. Because of their size, they are accessible to even the smallest fruit-eating songbird - realize that birds don't have teeth and must be able to swallow their fruit whole. What makes these "little hips" extra valuable, however, is that the trees hold the ripe fruit well into winter if nothing has eaten it first. Fruit that lasts into the end of winter, like these and many of the native hollies is extremely important. Outside a former office window at a job I no longer work at were 8 dahoon holly trees (Ilex cassine) - all females. They must have had a nearby lover because each year they were full of fruit and I kept my eye on it. Each and every winter, those trees remained loaded with ripe red fruit - to the point that each year I would wonder why this largesse  remained unwanted. The answer came each and every year in February when a flock of cedar waxwings would appear and feed on them; one tree per day, until each was stripped. I cannot be completely sure, but I suspect that this flock contained the same birds each year and that this grove of hollies was a vital stop on their way up north to nest.

Fruit for birds needs to meet certain characteristics to be most useful.
1. It needs to remain on the plant until it is consumed. Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), for example, does not. Uneaten fruit quickly shrivels up and falls to the ground.
2. It generally is going to turn a bright color (red most often) to signal its availability. There is a reason why fruit almost always starts out green and cryptic and changes to red or purple when it is ripe.
3. It has to be small enough to be swallowed whole. Large birds. like jays and crows, can eat large fruit such as the acorns of live oaks (Quercus virginiana), but the smaller warblers, vireos, etc. that overwinter in my region can't. The wax myrtle fruit that the yellow-rumped warblers rely on are tiny.

Fruit of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida)

Fruit of sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana)

Creating diversity in your landscape is the single-most important thing you can do - do not plant masses of any one species. Do not plant things that are already in your neighbor's yard. There is no need. Choose your plants based on their ecological contribution and plant for winter food for all the birds that are counting on you. The caterpillars and other invertebrates will be important in the spring, but birds need winter food as well.