Progress One Bird at a Time
Palm warbler I spend a great deal of time in my landscape watching things. I do it unabashedly. It is the only way to know what is visiting and what is not - what is staying and what isn't. While the pollinators found me well within the first 6 month's of my arrival here, it's the birds by which I judge my progress. The bees and butterflies are more than mobile as they skirt across this rather barren suburban area that I now live in; they cue in on their host plants and they can sense them from a good distance away. Once they've done that, they generally are here to stay and I now have a great diversity of butterflies, bees, and other invertebrates. Birds, however, are not that easy. They are looking for much more-complex elements in a landscape if they are to make their homes in it - even for a brief time during migration or during the winter months. It takes more than a few years to really accomplish much in the way of creating good bird habitat. One has to be an op...