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Backyard Safari: Spring Migration Brings Back the Birds

We have birds that stay in our Ohio neighborhoods all year long, but starting in March or April, we can see many more kinds (or species) of birds when those that migrated south for the winter begin to return. They will nest and raise babies this spring and summer, maybe in a tree in your yard!

One of the first returning species you might notice is the American Robin. Robins are part of the Thrush family of birds, which have a varied diet and love to eat tasty caterpillars, grubs, and winged insects. That makes them one of your yard’s ...

Beneficial Birds!

In spring and summer, birds are active and hungry. They also have quick-growing young to feed. They need lots of protein so they love to catch and eat your most destructive bugs, like aphids, caterpillars, grubs, grasshoppers and beetles. In addition to robins, many colorful warblers and other birds spend their summers in Ohio, visiting yards and eating bugs.

You can attract wild birds to your yard and garden with bird baths, bird houses, and flowering vegetation. When they visit, they will eat many times their own weight in insects as well as giving you the pleasure of seeing their beautiful summer plumage and interesting antics.

BACKYARD SAFARI PROJECT

Buy a bird identification guide and look up the species of birds you see, trying to identify them. Or take pictures of the birds and look them up online. A good place to start is the bird ID page on Whatbird.com, http://identify.whatbird.com/mwg/_/0/attrs.aspx

Beneficial Bugs: Nematodes

Worms! The word alone can make your skin crawl! But some worms can benefit people and gardens in many ways. You might have heard about all good things earthworms do for your yard, but there’s another “good” worm – this one so small, you can only see it with a microscope.

In moist, dark environments, worm-like beneficial nematodes (also called insect parasitic nematodes) kill almost all pest insects. That makes them ideally suited to combat pests that attack plants in their root zones, tree galleries, thatch of lawns, bark cracks, crowns, and corn tassels. Nematodes will also work on insects that bore into wood, trees, and shrubs.

And you can actually add beneficial nematodes to your landscape as a living “insecticide.” They will hunt, penetrate, and kill insect larvae, caterpillars, grubs, and maggots, which are most susceptible to nematodes, but will kill some adult stage insects, too.

In fact, nematodes have been found to kill more than 230 insect species, including; black vine weevils, cabbage root maggots, codling moth larvae, corn earworm, cucumber beetles, cutworms, flea beetles, flea larvae, fungus gnat larvae, Japanese beetle larvae, root maggots, sod webworms, and wireworms.

Scientific evidence shows that nematodes are safe to people, pets, earthworms, plants, and the environment; they are exempt from EPA registration as pesticides.

Nematodes have been developed as commercial biological controls by producing them in living hosts and selecting for the most active strains.

You can buy beneficial nematodes to use in your yard and garden from some yard and garden stores and many sources on the internet.

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