ON THE WING
When planning a bird garden, and taking into consideration the food requirements of birds, we must divide the plants into three categories — to match the bird groups I discussed last week in my “home for birds” column. As I mentioned, these are the nectarivores, frugivores and seedeaters. Birds eat practically every type of living thing. Beaks are a good way of identifying what type of food they eat. Birds will forage in shrubs and trees, on the lawn and among ground covers, and in tall grasses. Vegetarians feast on nectar or fruit. Omnivores are generalist and opportunistic feeders, eating nectar, seeds or berries, or searching for insects from under bark or in the ground.
Carnivorous birds eat anything from arthropods to other birds and mammals. It’s also worth remembering that flowers also attract insects, so these will attract not only nectar eaters but insectivores like superb fairy-wrens (pictured), which require a supply of small insects.
When it comes to nectar and pollen eaters, some nectarivores like the smallest member of the honeyeater family, the eastern spinebill, have long, slender, curved beaks that can reach into the base of long, tubular flowers. This enables them to find nectar that many species can’t get to. These spinebill-attracting plants include common heath, with its tiny pink bell flowers. Lorikeets and some other nectarfeeding parrots also have a specialised tongue. However, because they have a typically parrot-shaped beak, they favour more open flowers where nectar is presented in cups of various sizes. Lorikeets, like other birds, are also pollinators of these plants and are vital to propagation.
The second group of garden birds, the frugivores or fruit-eaters, are usually generalists like the rosellas and currawongs, together with wattlebirds. They supplement their diet with fruit when it is available. Many forage high in the canopy of their preferred tree.
When we talk of fruit, though, we must not exclude the smaller birds, which might normally be seen on flowers. Most species like fruit when it is available. The seedeaters come in many sizes, from tiny finches to our various cockatoos, their beaks adapted to whatever seed they eat.
Bird-friendly plants are only part of a much bigger picture, however. Gardens should not stand in isolation, and gardens linked together can provide the green oases birds seek amid concrete and glass in cities and suburbs. Connectivity of gardens in a given area is a vital component of attracting birds — and mammals — to the suburbs. This involves a group of neighbours getting together to plant natives. If everyone did it, we could attract myriad species of birds to our collective gardens.