While I’ve always been a lover of nature, I’m not a birder. I’ve got the major categories down — owl, duck, bluejay, swallow (or is it a sparrow?), etc. — but I usually rely on my wife to identify them any further. The exception was the other day when we saw a new duck on our pond and I googled “small duck with mohawk” into my phone and came up (correctly) with the hooded merganser, to her great astonishment.
But my bird identification skills — or my reliance on my wife and/or Google — are going to need to improve, because we seem to have quite a few more birds on our farm than when we arrived just three years ago. (I say “seem to” because I don’t want to underestimate the human tendency — perhaps the uniquely American tendency — to misrepresent the past. We’re not really that good at remembering, for example, how good or bad the weather or the political situation or the kids’ spelling skills used to be.)
Contrary to this caveat, since we acquired and started managing our 10-acre property according to the principles of ecological agriculture, I do think the number and diversity of birds here has increased. We’ve worked to transform what prior to 1993 was corn and soy, and from 1993 to 2021 was mostly acres of treated and mown grass, into something that’s beginning to look like a biologically diverse landscape. About a quarter acre is garden that’s heavily composted or mulched with woodchips, leaves and grass clippings. Within the garden and in other spots are perennial and annual flowers. Some of the garden consists of flowering cover crops, including buckwheat, phacelia, clover and mustard. We leave plenty of areas unmown. We’ve also planted about a hundred fruit trees, 75 hazelnuts and chestnuts, and a couple hundred berries of various types. The compounding ecological benefits of these decisions has, I believe, resulted in a plethora of new bird species.
According to my wife, here’s a list of what we’ve seen: eastern bluebirds, catbirds, robins, cardinals, sandhill cranes, owls, hawks, swallows/sparrows, goldfinches and other unidentified finches, nuthatches, and woodpeckers. In the pond, we’ve witnessed herrings, geese and ducks (including the aforementioned hooded mergansers). We also have bats, which even I know are not birds, but which do swoop around the orchard at dusk eating bugs. The next step is to figure out what types of houses we should put up to attract even more flying creatures.
And yet, away from our backyard, there is reason to worry. It’s anecdotal again, but it does seem like far fewer bugs end up on the car windshield than used to. We’ve chosen to not try raising bees, at least for now, because survival rates are so low (and because we have good access to maples for syrup). And of course we worry about what gets sprayed on our neighbor’s corn/soy field, which common sense alone tells us can’t be good for wildlife.
But in spite of the challenges from conventional, toxic forms of agriculture, our experience shows that ecological principles work and that partnering with nature can produce increasingly healthy results.
And that’s the view from the country.
