Resources for Creating Bird Friendly Gardens

Native Gardening creates habitats that support a wide variety of birds. Adapted to local environmental conditions, native plants require less water, are pest resistant and generally low maintenance. Below are helpful links for gardening with native plants.

  • Calscape.org helps you select the right native plants for your location. The California Native Plant Society partnered with the UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium to create this native plant database that helps you discover the plants best suited to your property.

  • UC Davis Arboretum Watch this site for native plant sales and native plant information. Check out their Sustainable Garden Toolkit for articles on Valley-wise gardening.

  • UC Davis Bee Haven is the UC Davis School of Entomology’s pollinator-friendly garden and is open daily from dawn until dusk. If you can’t visit in person, check out their Bee Gardening Resources and Bee Gardening Classes.

  • UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab is a good resource to find the best plants for bees and other pollinators.

  • Wild Birds Unlimited in Sacramento is a wonderful resource for bird food, feeders, houses, and other items that can help make your backyard a destination for local birds. If you should decide to have feeders, birdbaths, or birdhouses in your garden, please clean them regularly to prevent infections that can harm birds. Instructions on how to clean birdbaths can be found here.

Foothill Penstemon

Foreground: Common Wooly Sunflower, Coyote Mint
Background: Deer Grass, California Fuchsia, Silver Bush Lupine, Yarrow

 

Bush Anemone

Images by Nancy Kapellas

Nest boxes are wonderful additions to your bird-friendly garden. With patience and a little luck your nest box could house one of several species native to the Sacramento region: Tree Swallow, Oak Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, Bewick’s Wren, House Wren, Ash-Throated Flycatcher and Western Bluebirds. Or you could provide a safe haven for a flying mammal by installing a bat box.

Visit the following links to learn more:

  • All About Birdhouses: Right Bird, Right House
    From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this NestWatch tool will help you determine which birds you can build a nest box or nest structure for in your region or habitat.

  • California Bluebird Recover Program
    Provides information and training on how to install and maintain appropriate nest boxes for bluebirds and other cavity nesters. Watch their January 2022 presentation to the Sacramento Audubon Society on Successful Backyard Nestboxes.

  • Installing Bird Boxes
    This article from California Audubon has links to specifications for building and placing nest boxes for several California Bird Species including: Barn Owl, Western Bluebird, Ash-throated Flycatcher, Tree Swallow, House Wren, and White-breasted Nuthatch

  • Bat Houses
    From Bat Conservation International, here you will find information on building or buying Bat Houses as well as information on how beneficial bats are to the local and global ecosystem.