Steller’s jays are year-round residents at our mountain home, toughing out deep blizzards, 30-below cold, and howling 50-mph winds. Some take the easier road and live year-round at lower elevations. At home, we had roughly 60 of these birds within a quarter mile of the house; here in town, we’re thrilled to be hosting two at our little fake woods. “Must’ve followed us down from the mountain,” we joke. Photo © Matt Bartmann, used by permission
Boy, nothing brings home the importance of native plants like moving to a yard where there isn’t a single one.
If this were a permanent perch for husband Matt and me, the yard would’ve been completely revamped by now. But it’s a temporary rental, ’til we can get back to our mountain home after we fix the damage from the big Colorado flood, come spring.
And the landlord wants it kept the way it is—lawn in front and back, a hedge of lilacs, two ash trees by the street, a Siberian elm out back.
Birds? Few and far between, compared to our usual digs.
And most of the birds we see are just as non-native as the plants.
A solid dozen of big, pale gray collared doves, a Eurasian species, flutter about the neighborhood.
Hordes of house finches, originally from California, and a healthy mob of house sparrows, from European ancestors, chirp from the lilac hedge.
Flocks of starlings, descendants of British birds, fly hither and yon.
Even the blue jays that come shrieking through the yard every day aren’t natives—they moved into Colorado less than 20 years ago.
But it’s not all “city birds,” as I think of them.
A few robins are wintering in the neighborhood, a small band of black-capped chickadees and a pair of white-breasted nuthatches pass through on their daily foraging rounds, and a bunch of slate-colored juncos work the seedheads in the field beyond our back fence.
And, best of all, some of our mountain friends are spending the winter in town, just like we are.
Some mountain birds fly south in fall—our hermit thrushes, rusty-backed juncos (which, for some reason, are properly called “gray-headed juncos”), mountain bluebirds, and broad-tailed hummingbirds say goodbye for six months, traveling hundreds, even thousands of miles to southward wintering spots.
A summer-only friend in the high Rockies, the mountain bluebird heads south to more hospitable climes where the insects and berries it depends on are still available in winter. Photo © Matt Bartmann, used by permission
But many “migrate vertically” instead. They move down to lower elevations, where food is more abundant and more accessible in winter. Snows aren’t as deep down here in Fort Collins, compared to our usual home a mile higher. Temperatures are milder, too, which means birds need less food to get by.
And that was our goal: How to bring those vertical vacationers into this unappealing-to-birds yard?
We faked it.
First, we added a wall of glass patio doors inside the roll-up door of the attached garage we’ve claimed as our living quarters.
We wanted to see the outside world when we open the garage door in the morning, but not freeze to death. That part of the plan worked perfectly.
But there was one big glitch.
Our view is of a busy street, and of other houses, and of the joggers, cyclists, and dog-walkers who seem to constantly go by.
Not so great for people who’d rather watch birds and insects and other critters.
So we added a woods. On the bare concrete pad right in front of the garage.
No, not with jackhammers and shovels. Didn’t think the landlord would be too happy with that, since the garage will go back to being a garage when we move out.
Instead, we made a portable garden.
Using native plants we hauled down from home, we planted our little woods in big black plastic pots.
The view through our patio-door wall inside the garage—a fool-’em forest, on a very small scale.
It worked like a charm. The plants don’t block the sound of cars going by, but they do make a visual privacy screen and give us something more interesting to look at than concrete.
And they brought in the birds. Okay, so the feeders we added were the main attraction, I’m sure. But it’s been great fun seeing our wintering friends from the mountains take advantage of the plants, too.
Just like every garden I’ve ever made, I planted these pots in layers to cram as much into the space as I could.
The more plants, the better, as far as birds are concerned. The more plants the better, in my eyes, too.
- I started by digging out a couple of young lodgepole pines, the dominant species in our part of the mountains.
- Then I added native shrubs from home—wide bushes of rusty buffaloberry (Shepherdia canadensis); colony-forming (and well named!) prickly rose (Rosa acicularis and its subspecies, Rosa acicularis sayi); a few native willows; and a creeping juniper (Juniperus horizontalis).
Bears love buffaloberries even more than birds. In fall, when the bruins are fattening up for hibernation, one will sit right in the middle of the wide-spreading bush, pulling the branches through its paws to strip the fruit. Don’t try the berries yourself—they’re loaded with bitterly astringent saponins that make you go “Ptooey!” at first taste.
- At their feet, I jammed in bleached-blonde clumps of alpine reed grass (Calamagrostis purpurascens), a native relative of the ubiquitous ‘Karl Foerster’ hybrid that seems to be in every garden around here.
- Evergreen, creeping kinnikinnick, or bearberry, adds a touch of greenery at the lowest level, softening the stark rims of those pots.
It looks just like home. Except on a much smaller scale. And as long as you don’t focus on the pots.
A magazine centerfold, this is not. But it is a decent little patch of cover where, previously, none existed.
Not an inch of planting space to spare in these pots, because we wanted to create as much bird cover as we could. Dead branches add height and perches; red hips of prickly rose brighten the scene. Photo © Matt Bartmann, used by permission
And hallelujah—our vacationing mountain bird friends recognized the plants!
Before we built our little woods, we’d been hearing the high, thin, single-note calls of a Townsend’s solitaire in the neighborhood. Solitaires depend on berries in the winter, and this guy (or gal; they look alike) was moving from one juniper to another down the street, stripping the berries.
Somehow that bird spotted the single heavily berried juniper I’d oh-so-carefully transported down to town.
“Stay away from this, dogs,” I’d scolded, when I loaded the ultra-prickly plant into the car. It wasn’t the stabbing needles of the foliage I was worried about—it was those precious berries I wanted to keep intact.
The berries the solitaire somehow noticed.
The berries that were gone in two days, once the solitaire spotted them.
That was the whole point, of course. Though I sure wished the solitaire hadn’t gobbled ‘em up so fast, so we could’ve enjoyed his visits a little longer. But he’s gone now, moved off to greener pastures of berry bushes.
And that’s just as it should be: Birds with picky, er, particular, tastes follow that food. Want solitaires? Plant junipers. It’s just that simple, when it comes to attracting these loners-by-nature.
Purple harebells grow through the prickly branches of this creeping juniper on the floor of the pine forest. A single plant can easily be 15 feet across. I chose a manageable small one, with plentiful berries, to bring to town.
After the solitaire took his leave, a little flock of slate-colored juncos moved in. The inviting cover of the twiggy shrubs and grasses, even though they’re in pots, makes the birds feel safe, and the seeds make them linger.
In between pecking at millet, the juncos cling to the stems of those native grasses in the pots, bending the seed-laden plumes down to reach. Just as they do in winter in the mountains—as long as those seedheads stick up above the snow.
A mix of winter-resident slate-colored juncos and summer-resident gray-headed juncos overlaps in late April, as they seek sustenance during typical spring weather in the mountains. (The good news? It warms up fast, and even a snow like this may be gone in just a few days.) Photo © Matt Bartmann, used by permission
The wintering robins are enjoying the self-serve restaurant here, too. But they prefer the easy pickings of raisins to having to pluck the rose hips from those super-stickery bushes.
While the juncos have no problem perching among the wickedly thorny stems, you can practically hear the robins crying “Ouch!” when their much bigger feet make a misstep.
American robins from the mountains “migrate vertically” to winter in town. They arrive nearly an hour before sunrise every day at our little fake woods. Photo © Matt Bartmann, used by permission
At first, I thought they eschewed the hips because they were still astringent, but, nope, I taste-tested myself, and the cold spells have softened the hips to a delicious sweet-tart flavor.
And it turns out the robins are eating them, if slowly—every time one gets knocked to the ground by the juncos, it disappears in a flash down a robin’s gullet.
As for the red-shafted northern flickers, they make a half-hearted attempt every now and then to drill at the dead aspen trees we “planted” as landing places. But they’re way more interested in the suet and nuts we serve.
Ignore that parked car in the driveway lol—this is a woods, and this female red-shafted flicker quickly felt at home among the potted plants. Photo © Matt Bartmann, used by permission
The world outside our window is just a small facsimile of the wild places, a tiny bit of home transplanted to town.
But it’s enough for now. And I’m mighty happy the birds agree.
When it’s time to return to our mountain home, the fake woods is coming with us. Not to be put back into the ground, but to offer natural food opportunities to the birds that visit us on our raised deck.
Wonder if any of our summer birds will recognize it from their winter vacation?
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