Insect Hotels! Who Knew?

If you saw my post from last May, you know I'm interested in birds.  One way to increase birds in your yard is to provide lots of cover for both birds & insects, which birds eat.  We do have some brush & lots of rotting wood around, which help to create a natural habitat.  In other words, neat yards are unnatural and may look nice to us, but they are quite critter-unfriendly.  

As a gardener, you probably want bugs for birds to eat & more native bees to pollinate your yard, meaning you'll need to provide housing (i.e., cover) for those bugs.  What to do?  Well, one way is to build an insect hotel! 

We have already started one, and we'll keep you posted as it goes along.  But I thought you'd enjoy some photos of absolutely lovely & amazing insect hotels (apparently they're quite a thing in Europe). Sunset magazine refers to them as yard art; they have some nice photos of tiny insect hotels (more like insect inns).  

Also, at the bottom of this post you'll see some links to "how to" pages.

Online how to guides: 
1. Permaculture.org's How To page
2. BBC Wildlife provides a downloadable PDF
3. Pacific Horticulture magazine provides one, too

Note that all have great photos, too.

A Bird Friendly Yard? Here's How...

Birds are quite important to me (and our indoor cat who enjoys lots of kitty TV), and one

Brown-headed Cowbird from AllAboutBirds.com

way to attract more to your yard is to apply a few of the suggestions from the Audubon at Home (AAH) program.  Right now I've seen over 20 different species (including Red-Shouldered & Cooper's Hawks, 2 types of woodpeckers), and I've only begun following the AAH suggestions in earnest. 

Most important is to plant native species, lots of them, in bunches (multiples of one type of plant).  This gives birds & bees lots of cover & food.  

Second is to remove invasive plant species (Oh, English Ivy, I curse you curse you curse you!).  Livestock for Landscapes rents out small herds of goats, if you have lots of invasives to remove, or have a steep, unreachable area needing cleaning up.  (This really works!  A friend in California has a goatherd & his goats come every spring to clean up the cliff behind her house.)  We have a flat yard, so put down newspaper, wet the newspaper, then applied a few inches of leaf mulch from the City's program (they deliver).  It didn't clean up 100%, but I'd say 80% is long gone, allowing natives some space to become established. 

There are 10 suggestions in all about how your backyard can be friendlier to birds & bees & little animals at Ten Ways to Make A Difference for Migrating Birds. Take a few, or more, to heart & see what happens next. 

And once you've got all those amazing birds hanging out at your place?  If you'd like an online way to identify them, try WhatBird, which lets you search by color, state, size, and other variables. 

And eBird, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, lets you track your bird sightings online.  Not only do you get to use their tools for counting what you've seen where, but your data is used by ornithologists, conservations biologists, land management experts, etc. via the Lab to do research on migration, climate change, bird abundance & distribution.  

Happy native planting & birding!