It's bird season!

Happy Waabgonii Giizis (Blooming Moon)! At long last, the flowers are out, and all of our Earthly Kin are getting back to their warm weather activities. 

In this beautiful season, we encourage you to all go out and get to know the Native Plants and to watch them grow! There are many early blooming plants that you may not know, but who support our other Earthly Kin in this important time of year, when food may still be a bit scarce.

Upcoming Events

Our next monthly walk is May 30th at 4 pm! Details to be confirmed, so stay tuned!

Shrubby thickets are for the birds

Interfloric citizens. Fertility islands. First caretakers of other creatures. Aren't those fabulous ways of seeing shrubs? Shrubby thickets are havens for songbirds. They offer food (nectar, insects, berries, fruit, seeds, nuts, buds). They’re fertility islands not just for birds, but for insects, including pollinators, as well. 

During breeding season, they also offer safe nesting habitat. You may not even know a songbird nested until the shrubs lose their leaves.  Despite being adjacent to the main path at Lakeside, we didn't spot this nest in the Carolina Rose until spring.

Think about thickets as densely planted dwarf forests — usually under 10 metres — of diverse native shrubs (many of which like to spread clonally) and small trees. They’re wonderful under power lines, along streets or pathways, as hedgerows between properties, along woodland edges and creeks, and as a low maintenance replacement for lawns. Despite being mostly deciduous, their density provides year round privacy.

In why thickets matter - food chain restoration, Solomon Doe from Indigenous Landscapes writes:

Early-ripening berry shrubs such as Black Raspberries, Serviceberries, Blueberries, and Blackberries support new bird parents while leaves host the Lepidoptera that birds need to raise their nestlings. Fall ripening shrubs offer fatty berries which are particularly important for migrating birds. These include various Dogwood species, Spicebush, Mountain Ash, Pokeweed (a perennial, but looks like a shrub), and Sassafras as well as seeds from shrubs such as Buttonbush and Hoptree. 

In late winter Nannyberries, Sumac, Hawthorn, Aronia, Bayberries, Roses, Red Cedar, and Crabapples offer critically important sustenance. 

Thickets, like this one at Lakeside, make fabulous hedgerows and privacy screens. To maximize support for birds and insects, speed up the thicketing process and reduce opportunities for unwanted plants to move in, plant shrubs close together and prune them 10-30cm from the ground to encourage them to branch out. Solomon Doe suggests that: 

You can also use thickets as a ground layer underneath trees. This thicket of Gro-Low Fragrant Sumac on a green island in the Utilities Kingston parking lot does a fabulous job of providing dense cover. However, it’ll support far fewer birds and insects than a thicket of 3-5 different species with various flowering & fruiting times.

To replicate natural ecosystems and maximize biodiversity and beauty, design 3 layer thickets. This is the approach of University of Melbourne’s Woody Meadows project, a rambunctious research project done in collaboration with the University of Sheffield and the City of Melbourne. 

To mimic the natural form of the community from which the plants are drawn and to maintain year-round visual interest, their typical proportion of plants is roughly 70% low-growing shrubs in the base layer, 25% in the mid-layer (shrubs that grow from 1 to 1.5 metres tall) and 5% in the upper layer (shrubs and small trees 2-3 metres tall) though, as you can see from the above illustration, each planting differs based on location and plant community. They then coppice Woody Meadows every 1-3 years to promote flowering and encourage dense canopies that exclude weeds.

Melbourne’s approach is a wonderful example of reimagining what Mark Laurence, in The New Shrubscape, calls dull municipal plantings.

Once you’ve established a thicket, you can either mow along to edges to control further expansion or use hard edges (which we have a lot of in cities!) In this small front yard, the driveway, house and road keep the Sumac from spreading into neighbouring spaces. 

We’re still working on our list of trees and shrubs for hedgerows or thickets. In researching native shrubs, we realized that most like to thicket (unless you buy clones or cultivars from non-native plant nurseries). This makes sense as a survival strategy as they evolved in an ecosystem where they’re regularly browsed by rabbits or deer. Coppicing mimics this natural process. If you’re designing a thicket, you can skip the canopy layer. Or if you’d like some non-thicketing structural plants, choose a few canopy or understory trees (though a few of these might thicket as well). I’ll slowly profile the different plants on this list. Here are a few that I’ve already written about: Persimmons are North America’s largest berry, Supermarket Plums are a kind of collective forgetting and Red Osier Dogwood in the web of life. Solomon Doe, an advocate for conserving and restoring native thickets, has an amazing series of posts on thicketing plants.

Last fall we planted our first thicket in Meadowbrook Park. As we rethink lawns, let's embrace thickets and shrublands as lawn alternatives. Should you take up the thicket challenge, you'll be gifted with birdsong in the spring, breeding birds in the summer, migratory birds stopping by to fuel up in the fall and a glorious bounty of invertebrates. 

Birding for Citizen Science

This past Saturday (May 10th) was Migratory Bird Day (which, just like migration, happens twice a year). To celebrate, a few of us gathered at Lakeside Community Garden to learn from Paul Preston, a PhD student at Queens who is currently studying the impact of disturbance on song sparrow nests. We were fortunate to come across one of their nests during this activity! It was remarkably difficult to spot this one, since it was at ground level and hidden under a layer of plants.

We learned lots of new things from Paul, including:

• Different birds like different nesting habitats - song sparrows, for example, tend to like shrubby covered spots near the ground

• The Merlin Bird App, for those who didn’t know (like me), can identify multiple bird calls at once while recording, which is a great way to get to know everyone’s calls

• If you are interested in contributing to citizen science by logging your observations, you can use eBird, which is kind of like iNaturalist, but not the same. Paul recommended that, if you want the data you collect to be scientifically useful, you should aim to create a “complete list”, where you log all the birds you see or hear in a particular time period and location, not just the ones that are rare

• Not all sparrows are song sparrows; house, chipping, white-crested, and white-breasted sparrows are not song sparrows

We also learned a few cool facts about birds of prey from one of the other people working on the Song Sparrow project (we unfortunately didn’t catch her name, but she had all the best facts):

• Peregrine falcons are the fastest animals on the planet, and can fly at speeds of over 300 km/h. There are some nesting on the Princess Towers downtown

• You can differentiate vultures from other birds of prey that wheel high in the sky because they fly in a slight V-shape, and wobble (because they are very light)

• Falcons have very fast metabolisms, so they need to eat a lot of calories. This means that, if you come across a bird carcass with no innards but wings, feet, and even the head still intact, it was probably a falcon that ate it (since the parts they leave are not very calorie dense)

• Owls favour stealth over speed, so their wings make very little noise; they prefer to glide over to their prey and scoop them up silently

Happy birding! And if you do come across a song sparrow nest between May and July that is on public property (or on your property, if you don’t mind the researchers coming to observe the nest), then Paul would love to hear from you about it! You can reach him at [email protected].