The Lazy Winter Bird Watcher

by Soňa Mason

With the exceptionally cold winter days this season, one cannot help wonder how the creatures living outside are managing. While most have fur and feathers, those are but insulation to their real source of warmth: their internal furnaces, fueled by food. Which perhaps explains the popularity of bird feeders in winter. The high caloric contents are so attractive that they draw many critters, including bears in some locations.

For people like myself who are either too lazy to bother with the tedium of bringing bird feeders inside at night, or just too cheap to spend hundreds of dollars each winter on seed, there is a simple and rather attractive solution: grow them.

In areas far from benevolent homeowners, birds fend for themselves by foraging for wild food in the form of seed, berries, nutlets and overwintering insects. These options offer an array of planting choices for a garden.

Easiest are familiar and easy-to-obtain perennials like Coneflower (Echinacea), which pair well with Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia), Milkweeds, Coreopsis and native Sunflowers (Helianthus). Add a dash of silver to the garden color palette with Rattlesnake master (Eryngium) and the fragrant mountain mints (Pychnanthemum).

Shrubby perennials like Wild Senna (S. hebecarpa) and Wild Indigo (Baptisia) offer larger seeds in pods typical of the bean family (Fabiacaea).

Let us not forget native grasses. Switchgrass (Panicum), Blue and Side-oats Gramma (Bouteloua) and Dropseed (Sporobolus), offer extra dimension to the garden structure.

For added nutrition, include plants whose stems thicken in places where insects burrow in to overwinter, like Joe Pye (Eutrochium) and Goldenrod – notably the attractive and not-so-aggressive Showy Goldenrod (Solidago speciosa). Whether the birds find them during the cold months or not, the insects will be a valuable source of food for future generations of songbirds and their young.

Shrubs with over-wintering berries include the aptly-named Winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata), an eye-catching deciduous species that puts on a brilliant show once the leaves have dropped off.

And not least of all, the often unfairly-thought-of Sumac, with its unmistakable russet red fruit clusters that glow against a winter sky. There is a persistent myth about the notion of “poison sumac”, in that all sumacs are to be avoided and even stamped out. Whereas in fact the only member of this group that has any effects like that of poison ivy, lives in a swamp. The rest are valuable sources of food for birds, with spectacular autumn color. Yes they do grow in colonies, much like the non-native Rose of Sharon, or the common milkweed, but like the latter species, their traveling shoots can be simply mowed over in the growing season.

Plant these food sources where you can watch the bird show from a convenient window, and leave them standing throughout winter. They provide winter interest rather than a boring intensely manicured landscape, not to mention the pompom heads of some of the flowers look adorable wearing little winter snow hats.