Hi, I'm Mark Cullen, Home Hardware's Lawn & Garden spokesperson.
I'm delighted to be at the Home Furniture Store in St. Jacobs, Ontario with my good friend Jody Allair.
Jody is a biologist, a full-time biologist with Bird Studies Canada,
the largest organization in the country I understand, dedicating to birding.
That's right.
Now, you've been with Bird Studies Canada for how long?
Almost 11 years now.
Well thank you so much for joining us here.
You and I have spent some time out in the field doing some birding,
and I have to say Jody, I have learned so much from the time I've spent with you about birding,
and your incredible ability to hear the slightest little sound from a bird and be able to identify it.
Or see it flit by in a brief second and be able to identify it.
Let's talk for a moment about Canadians passion for birds.
We like to attract them to our yards,
we like to observe them as we walk from one place to another,
we like to see them as we drive down the highway.
What would be your advice, and sort of the big picture,
what would be your advice to every Canadian where attracting birds is concerned.
The #1 thing that we should know about attracting birds to our own yard.
Well the great thing about attracting birds to your own yard is that there's no big secret, there's no real magic bullet,
it's actually a very easy thing to do.
And you could do a couple things:
you could put up some bird feeders,
and you could work on creating and working on landscaping of your yard to create a habitat that's really good for birds.
There's actually a couple really easy things you can do in your own yard to attract birds,
and because birds are everywhere,
you can find them right across the country and many of them are quite common.
It's actually just doing a couple little things and the next thing you know,
you're going to have birds spending a lot of time in your yard.
How can we use plants to attract birds and why?
There's a couple things you can do with plants to attract birds.
One is you can focus on creating a backyard habitat for a lot of birds,
so having more shrubs, having more trees.
These are things that birds, song sparrows will nest in,
maybe you'll get some catbirds nesting in them.
So you can have more in terms of shrubs and trees, which will be a good habitat.
That transfers to more birds coming to your feeders,
specially if there's a nice mix of conifers in there through the winter months.
The other thing you can do is you can target planting,
so you can plant things that birds will feed on.
And some species of birds that people really like,
like waxwings, cedar waxwings, or bohemian waxwings, which are just gorgeous,
they're not going to come to your feeder and eat birdseed.
So if you want to attract those birds,
you need to have some berries that you're going to have through the winter months.
So I really like mountain ash berries, service berries, crab apples.
Crab apples are really good for the grosbeaks, pine grosbeaks, but also robins, American robins.
Not all robins actually migrate out through the winter months,
and the warmer winters robins will stay here through the winter.
And even up in Northern Ontario and even in Alberta you can find the robin spending the winter.
Crab apples are a very important winter food source for these birds.
So what you can think about in landscaping is not just providing cover for birds and breeding habitats for birds,
you could also plant plants, shrubs and trees, and flowers,
and things like sunflowers, that can feed the birds throughout the year as well.
I find with sunflowers they don't actually have to plant them, the birds do it for me.
"Oh yeah"
So I got black oil sunflowers everywhere and I don't always let them grow, but I do often let them grow,