Nature's insect control.

Do bugs bug your roses? Do caterpillars enjoy your cabbage before you do? Do mosquitoes make it impossible to enjoy warm summer nights? Maybe it’s time to enlist Mother Nature’s insect-control army to improve your quality of life. Bring on the birds! A single bird can eat 1,000 insects in an afternoon, providing it with critical amounts of fat, protein, and potassium needed to maintain its high metabolism level. Compared to insecticides, birds provide an efficient job of insect control—with no negative impact on the environment. Sign ‘em up!

To enlist the birds, you need to learn the species of insect eaters that reside in your part of the country and then effectively attract them to your property. “Insect-eating birds help control pests at every stage of life,” says Judy Barrett, an expert on organic gardening from Taylor, Texas. “They eat insect eggs, larvae, and adults. Birds such as barn swallows and purple martins can eat pounds of mosquitoes and other flying insects in a day. Robins, mockingbirds, chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and titmice are all vociferous insect eaters. Bluebirds’ favorite summer foods include grasshoppers, crickets, ground beetles, spiders, and caterpillars.” Other insect eaters include meadowlarks, red-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, Baltimore orioles, wrens, and eastern phoebes. Even birds you might not think of as insect eaters feed insects to their young to provide the protein they need to grow in their early days of life. By providing the birds’ basic needs—food, water, shelter, and a place to raise their young —you will be treated to an unending source of entertainment and beauty while keeping your insect population under control. Cultivating plants that produce seeds, fruits, and berries will provide food. Allowing flowers such as sunflowers, goldenrod, thistles, cone flowers, and daisies to go to seed will attract finches, juncos, and sparrows and other seed-feeding birds, which feed their young insects. Stocking feeders with seed that is popular with the birds you are trying to attract can enhance your natural feeding efforts. Sunflower seeds, cracked corn, and nyjer thistle are favorites. Birds have preferences of where and what they eat. Some like to feed on the ground, while others prefer to eat at raised feeders. By providing several different types of feeders, each filled with the types of feed birds are attracted to and locating them where those birds prefer to feed, will assure frequent and regular visits.

Your relationship with birds is one of mutual benefit. You provide for some of the birds’ basic needs, and they help keep down the insect population and treat you to an unending source of entertainment and pleasure. It’s a win-win situation if ever there was one. To learn more about attracting insect-eating birds to your backyard, go to the National Wildlife Federation’s Web site, www.nwf.org. You will find information on creating a habitat, established habitats in your area that you can visit, a list of resources to help in establishing a habitat, and much more.