Growing a Greener World

- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru, proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [gentle instrumental music] - [voice-over] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal.

To tell stories of everyday people.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real, they're passionate, they're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement, it's our mission.

One of the great benefits of gardening, is that we get to experience nature up close.

And that includes all the birds that come to visit.

So it's not surprising a bird's life is greatly impacted by the environment which is why we need to keep our feathered friends in mind as we go about our gardening practices.

Well today, we're gonna visit with a top gardening author who looks at birding from a gardener's perspective.

We'll see many of the benefits that happen when birds come to visit.

We'll look at simple ways to support their habitat.

We'll also look at how gardening design impacts the number of birds that come.

And later, we'll check in on a top ornithology lab to see how technology is impacting the way we keep up with birds.

From seeds to berries, to even apps for the smart phone.

[birds chirping] [soft music] Birds are among the first to be impacted by environmental change, and unfortunately studies today show that a lot of bird species are threatened due to climate change, habitat loss, and of course herbicide use.

Now there is some good news.

And there's one place where we can make a positive difference with our feathered friends, and that's in our own backyard.

For every plant we place, for everyone that we let go to seed, and for every plant that we don't spray, well those can all make a difference for the better.

In season four of "Growing a Greener World," we filmed an episode about leaving the rat race and slowing down in the garden.

The garden we featured had a very impressive way of intentionally drawing in the nature around it.

So when we were looking for a place to showcase backyard birds, we knew we wanted to film it there.

Margaret Roach is a well known author who left a high powered corporate job to garden and write full time in up state New York.

With her three best selling books and a popular blog, Margaret shares her gardening wisdom with others on a daily basis.

Her eye for designing with nature in mind shows at every turn in her landscape, but what many people don't realize is that this design is a direct result of a relationship with her backyard bird companions.

- I often say that I really think that birds taught me to garden.

And even though I didn't know that's what was happening at the time, when I first came here almost 30 years ago, and I was clearing the land and getting ready to make gardens, there were all these birds all over the place.

And I started to learn to identify them and engage with them, and I bought field guides and looked up who they were and what they were all about.

And I realized I wanted more of them in the garden that I was going to make, so in order to do that I kind of researched and found out what their needs were and I found out there were lots of bird plants, but for different seasons of the year.

Different kinds of plants appeal to them, so they like some plants for nesting in the spring, and some plants that provided food for their young, and some plants that provided food at migration time in the fall, and plants like evergreens for winter protection from the wind and so forth and so I started deliberately adding plants for the birds for all their needs in all the different seasons.

And so in doing that, in making choices for 365 days worth of plants for the birds, I kind of accidentally ended up with 365 days worth of plants for the gardener too.

And a 365 day garden.

They taught me and I'm grateful for that and they continue to entertain me as well.

[birds singing] I think for me what birds have done is be teachers and so I think it was my window in and the reason I would encourage other gardeners and other people in general to welcome birds is because it's a window in to the cycle of nature and how things work and who eats what and who gets eaten by who and just how things fit together and how things work.

So I think it's a big aha in birds, because they are another two legged creature like us which to me seeing them walk around and so forth, you know we don't got many other creatures that are like that, I feel kind of close to them.

And so I think it's an opportunity for engagement, for aha's, for connection.

[birds squawking] - Now Margaret if somebody wanted to become more involved with birds in their own backyard, what are some of the most important things for them to take into consideration?

- Number one thing that you have to do is if you wanna have a lot of birds, you have to have a lot of bird food.

And I don't mean in a feeder, I mean bugs.

So you gotta grow a lot of bugs.

And if you use chemicals, you're not growing a lot of bugs for the birds to eat.

So you have to stop using chemicals I think number one.

And I always think of what that Harvard biologist, the esteemed, E.O.

Wilson said, he calls all the little things that kind of live in or near the soil layer, "the little things that run the world."

And he says and I'm paraphrasing, he says, even he doesn't know with all his degrees what they do, but he knows without them we'd all be dead.

Not just the birds, but us.

So we have to have the food chain right at the bottom really intact.

We can't use chemicals including fertilizers and sterilize the soil.

So that I think is really, really important and then we have to stop mowing really also.

[Margaret laughing] - You won't get a lot of argument out of some people there.

- But look, I did, at least in one little area, right?

- [Joe] Right, Right.

- So again, this is, so what I'm doing is I'm sort of making a bug growing area.

An area where lots of things come into bloom and so forth.

And there's also host plants for caterpillars, earlier on, then you get foliage.

And so there's lots of action up here and the dragonflies love to come up here, and the bees love to come, everybody loves to come up here.

So I think that's kind of what a gardener has to do first of all, stop killing bugs and start growing more bugs.

Encouraging more bugs with more diversity.

- Right, and you've also said in addition to learning about the birds in your particular area, you should learn about the bugs that are there too.

- Well and you know me with my crazy pile of field guides, I mean I have more field guides than any other kind of book and it is, it's really important, because again it's the who eats what, and who eats that creature, and who eats that creat, it's the cycle.

And so it's fantastically interesting when you find out who's diet is what and then you note that like you grow a particular plant and the right butterfly or caterpillar shows up.

I mean it's like how did they know it was here?

And similarly the birds, so I think that's what's so great.

Those relationships, those ancient relationships really.

- I think you've made some new fans today.

We don't have to mow as much and we're allowed to have more bugs in our backyard.

- Yes, well actually I think a lot of people worry that they're like what do you mean I can't kill bugs.

But we have to get over the wish to squish.

We gotta stop like rushing to crush bugs.

Like we have to stop it, because if we don't even know what they are, why are we killing them?

And I think of them again as bird food, or frog food, or snake food, or dragonfly food.

I think of them as part of a healthy garden and planet.

- And if only 3% of all the bugs out there are pests anyway that means 97% are good or neutral.

- Correct and I squish the ones that I know to be pests that are usually alien, like a Japanese beetle.

You'll see me squishing that.

- Outta here.

- Right exactly, but not indiscriminate, lethal actions.

- Agreed, agreed.

- [soft music] - [Margaret] With the pollinators, even though the birds may not eat some of 'em like bees and so forth, which probably don't taste very good.

[laughing] The pollinators are doing a job that ends up serving the birds and small mammals, and so forth as well.

Which is that they're pollinating, which is going to make seeds, which is going to make fruit and so forth, so they're helping to produce food that the birds and others may eat.

Hummingbirds are interesting.

We only have one species here, but even if you're not using native species, certain honeysuckle, salvias, that may be native to others of the country, penstemons, et cetera, the more familiar hummingbird plants, I found that some of my garden plants even are very appealing to them.

Certain tiny species, morning glory's and especially a lot of self sowing nicotiana, which I've had for like 20 years and just keeps sowing and sowing.

And I let them sow right outside my window so that in the late summer and fall, I'm surrounded by hummingbirds where I sit and work all day.

[soft music] - So once we put those plants in our landscape, they provide a food source, and then we have a water source, there's still a lot of other considerations though to attract the maximum number of birds and keep them happy.

- Yes, and one of those should make gardeners happy [giggling] which is that you don't have to be as tidy as you think you do.

[Joe laughing] Which is kind of great.

But seriously don't clean up too soon.

Don't treat the garden especially in fall, when we're approaching fall and winter where there's gonna be less food available.

Don't treat it like your vacuuming your living room.

Starting at one corner and working all the way to the other, but leave things up that bear seed like some of these grasses that are near us.

Leave things up to benefit wildlife 'til the last minute.

And so I tease the garden apart.

In some areas I just leave up and it's actually visually can be very beautiful also, you know like grasses and so forth, and forbs dancing in the sun full of seeds in the winter, you know with the snow even above the snow, beautiful.

So that's important and creating lots of edge habitat, what's called edge habitat.

So not where the mown grass meets a forest [laughing], none of that vertical crazy stuff, where it's flat, then vertical crazy stuff.

- Like you've got right there.

- Yeah so I've made more big islands of multi-layered things next to where I have mown areas, and before the forest edge.

I'm surrounded by a tall forest.

- Well basically you're like simulating nature.

- Correct, lots of layers.

- Lots of layers.

- And so they say a dense edge is really where the action is for the birds and other wildlife.

- [Joe] Layers are important.

- And full of things like vines, thorns, shrubs, conifers, mix it up.

- Diversity.

- Right absolutely and multi-seasons.

[soft music] - Now we all know that water is an important resource.

Especially if you want to attract wildlife to your backyard.

And for birds, it's the most important thing and they need it 365 days a year.

Now having access to water in an urban setting especially is not always that easy, but you don't need a big fancy pond or anything like that to attract the birds, because you can even use an open container or a lid and just fill it with water.

Perhaps put a rock in the middle where they can land and then drink the water, then bathe around it.

And when it gets dirty of course you want to make it clean and make sure that you scrub it out.

Now if you live in an area where the water happens to freeze, you've gotta have access to that water, but it's a simple fix.

And it's a deicer.

Now you can buy those online or at a bird store for not a lot of money, and you can get one that's appropriately sized for the area that you're trying to deice.

But if you want birds to come, you need to make that area available for them everyday of the year and the deicer is a good answer for that.

Now while it may sound romantic to add a bird or nesting box to your location, there are some important things that you need to consider first otherwise you might set those birds up for disaster.

For example, how far apart do you space them?

What's the size of the box, and even what material do you use.

For example you don't wanna put the box up against a tree, because then you make it easy for predators to get to them like snakes and raccoons and others.

Even the material that you use.

If it's a dark color or if it's made out of metal, well that can become too hot for your baby birds, so the first thing that you need to do, decide the type of bird that you want to attract, and then do your homework and go from there.

But we have some great information on our website under the show notes for this episode and the website address, it's the same as our show name, it's growingagreenerworld.com.

[soft music] Margaret you know so many people love to have those bird feeders right outside their favorite viewing window.

Of course it's entertaining, but they also think it's important to supplement their diet.

Talk about that.

- Well first of all, the garden is the bird feeder.

And yes, I do have a bird feeder that I use when the bears are asleep from maybe Thanksgiving to March or so.

But it's really important if we're gonna feed with artificial feeders that we keep the birds safe when we're doing that.

Clean them regularly so they don't transmit disease from bird to bird from infection that they pick up on the feeder and also to not invite a confusing visual for an incoming bird who wants to light on that feeder to eat.

To come in at high speed and bang into a window, one of the leading causes of songbird death.

So you wanna put the feeder either within two feet of the house or the window or 30 or feet farther away the window so that there's none of those high impact collisions.

The other leading cause of death of songbirds when they come into our human environments is our cats.

So we really can't have cats out, murading, because they can't resist birds.

- [Joe] Well it's like a billion birds a year die from the bird strikes, and I think similarly from the cats.

- From the cats and some numbers even say multiple times that depending on which research data you look at, yes, yes.

- Those are very big numbers.

- So we need to keep birds safe.

We need to help keep birds safe.

[soft music] - You've been gardening with nature and birds for a very long time, so no substitute for experience, but you had your guide books so that helped, but that wasn't the only thing?

- No, there are even some free or almost free resources that I used right from the very beginning like the Great Backyard Bird Count or Project FeederWatch and what you do is it's a citizen science project.

So you are making observations, recording them, and then sharing them with the scientists, and you learn a lot and they learn a lot too which is great.

But the especially great thing when you're learning to bird, is that when you sign up, they send you like a whole form to fill out with all the birds listed that might be in your area and a flyer with pictures of them, so you can really learn right away.

This is what the male of this looks like, this is what the female of this looks like.

I might see this one, I might see that one, and I just started learning more and more and more birds.

And then I got past the flyer point and got my field guides and just kept going.

But yeah, so participating and now we do it online of course.

We participate, we share our data online.

- Which is so important because everybody is helping everybody else, and you do a great job of that, because you're so giving of your information and I know so many people are learning from that.

But it's really just kind of it takes everybody involved.

- Right, absolutely, absolutely.

- And it's fun to check off the little boxes once you get that id.

- Oh I get so excited when I see a new bird even this many years later.

I'm like "Oh I saw one I've never seen before."

It's so exciting.

[soft music] There are some great organizations that offer support and information for birding, but one of the best is The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

As a world leader in the study, appreciation, and conservation of birds, they're known for their technological innovations and for engaging people of all ages and protecting birds and the planet.

Mya Thompson is the elearning specialist at the lab.

Her job is to create online and interactive resources geared toward a deeper understanding of birds.

- So The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a place for researchers, educators, and students are all here to celebrate birds.

And we are lucky in that the researchers are here doing scientific research and the writers are here learning about the scientific research and people who are educators are trying to put this all together and bring it to as many people as possible, and I think it's a really unusual place that way.

My role here as the elearning specialist is to take the wonder of birds and bring it to as many people as possible.

When people start tuning in to birds, they really start to get curious because there's so much to learn, and we wanna help satisfy curiosity so as elearning really just means bring it to as many people as possible wherever they are.

So you're in your yard, you wanna know the answer, we wanna bring it to you.

So we've got a whole bunch of resources that try to help you satisfy your curiosity about birds.

[birds chirping] So birding's really changing.

So anyone interested in birds likely has a phone in their pocket, so when you're out there and you're watching that little flash of color go across up in the sky, you can actually use your phone to help you.

And there are lots of ways to do it.

One of the ways is a free app called Merlin and that uses crowdsource data to help you figure out what that bird is.

So you actually can just tell it where you are and a little bit of information about size and color and it's gonna give you a list of the likely birds in your area, but it's based on the collective mind of a big citizen science based database that allows you to actually get better information than you would by flipping through a field guide.

[soft music] So I think just like knitting and canning, there's a new generation of birders and of course the new generation of birders, they're all tech savvy.

And so they're really fun things that we've developed personally for the younger audience.

And one of them is called Bird song Hero.

So Bird Song Hero is a game and it plays on the fact that when you hear a bird, you might not necessarily know what it is, and it's also sometimes really hard to remember the pattern of a song without having any visual to go along with it.

So Bird Song Hero actually allows you to listen to a bird and then it actually asks you to choose from three visualizations of that sound that you hear.

And it's just a fun game.

It goes really quickly, but at the end, you're actually able to unite your senses, your ears and your eyes to help you remember those song patterns and so it's just one of the ways that you can sort of gamify the joy of the process of learning of about birds.

We have so many options now with interactivity in websites, and we're not just trying to make it interactive because it's fun, but it also helps you learn.

So when you're asked to think about something or gaze at a photo and think about it before you answer the questions, so what is this feather for?

Well I don't know is it for, does it help birds fly?

Does it help them attract a mate?

If you think about it before you answer and then you get the feedback, it really helps you learn.

It gets at that spark of curiosity.

You have a little bit of a question, you've thought about it before you get the answer and that really helps people learn.

And so a lot of the websites that we develop are actually designed with that in mind so that you are helping yourself learn by thinking about it a little before we give you the answer.

[soft music] - Well this has got to be one of the most beautiful places ever and it's on your campus, so technically this is your office right?

- Yeah, not a bad place to have an office.

- No we should all be so lucky.

Now tell me about where we are.

- These are the trails outside of The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Visitor's Center.

It's called Sapsucker Woods, because we have a lot of sapsuckers here.

Yellow-bellied sapsucker is our mascot and it's a sanctuary for birds.

There are a whole lot of birds that live here.

- Yeah this is fantastic.

Now you all are so actively involved with the public and the citizen scientists out there.

I know Margaret is a big fan of that.

Very important to her.

Tell me about some of the projects that you're involved with and maybe one in particular.

- Yeah so citizen scientists are basically taking their observations, their inspiration, and sharing it with the world so that we can gain a better understanding of birds and wildlife.

YardMap is very cool.

You actually map your yard and learn about what you can do to protect wildlife and improve wildlife habitat in your yard and share that with others.

And then this snowball effect happens, where people are seeing what others are doing and it's really having an exciting affect on how we view conservation and how other people are getting involved that wouldn't typically be involved in science.

- Right and it's that collaborative effort and then that resource provides tools for them to be able to do that.

- [Mya] Absolutely.

[soft music] - You have so many great programs, but I love the one that focuses on the urban environment.

Tell me about that.

- Yeah you can bird in the city too and Celebrate Urban Birds is a great way to do that and share your information with us.

So you just take a half a basketball court sized space anywhere and you sit for 10 minutes and you report on 16 birds.

Yes, no, or unsure and when you add that information to our Citizen Science database, we're really learning a lot about where birds are in the urban environment and how they're moving through it in a completely new way than we've understood in the past.

- Yep, and again, it's that sharing of information.

What about you have the bird feeder count.

- Yeah, so FeederWatch is fantastic because so many millions of people across the country are feeding birds, and there's a lot, and watching over their backyards and observing birds.

And FeederWatch allows you to take your observations and again share it with the collective mind so we can understand what's going on with feeder birds.

- Yeah so then there's the famous Backyard Bird Count.

- Yeah so that's four days in February.

A great way to get started.

It's basically counting as many birds as you can in your backyard, taking photos of them, uploading them to our website, and sharing that information, a celebration of birding in winter.

- Yeah, very cool program.

[soft music] You know of all the outdoor activities popular in America today, birding comes in at number 15, just ahead of cycling.

So it only makes sense that we do our part to help sustain their populations.

Especially when you consider much of that can be done from our own backyards or balconies.

If any of what you saw today intrigues you, we have a lot more information on our website.

Under the show notes for this episode, and the address, it's the same as our show name, it's growingagreenerworld.com Thanks for joining us everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l and we'll see you back here next time for more "Growing a Greener World."

- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru, proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: - All right so here we are working and these guys for school are coming through here just cruising around having the best time.

I mean how good is that?

I think we need to move up here and make our offices right off campus.

[laughing] Beautiful right?

[ambient electronic music] [male announcer]: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on-demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to: [funky techno jingle]