To me, a yard without birds is like a playground without children.
Birds fill our yards with melodious song, lively color and graceful movements. They provide hours of entertainment and make a yard less buggy by gobbling up countless numbers of pesky insects.
No wonder, then, that a frequently asked bird question is: How can I attract more birds — and a wider variety of them — to my yard?
The answer was obvious last weekend during the Atlanta Audubon Society’s annual Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary Tour, which featured the backyard gardens of several homes in the Decatur area — all of which are certified by Audubon as “wildlife sanctuaries.”
For certification, the gardens, all on average-size city lots, meet five criteria essential for birds: food sources, nesting sites, bird feeders, shelter and water sources. To help achieve those goals, homeowners grow and maintain a variety of mostly native trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers and other herbaceous plants that provide food, shelter and nesting sites for birds.
Not only are the gardens bird-friendly, they also are beautiful.
One of the gardens on the tour was that of my neighbors, Max and Carolyn Brown on Laurel Ridge Drive in Decatur. Sitting with them on their backyard deck last weekend, we watched numerous birds — cardinals, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Carolina chickadees, goldfinches, a bluebird, a red-bellied woodpecker and others — visit feeders and feast on dogwood berries and other food in the splendid yard.
Butterflies — Eastern tiger swallowtail, gulf fritillary, sleepy orange and cloudless sulphur — flitted about, sipping nectar from the colorful blooms.
Carolyn said her wildlife haven, which was certified last year, has been a work in progress — and a labor of love — for more than 22 years. “It allows me to focus on nature,” she said.
For more information on the certification program, visit: atlantaaudubon.org/backyard-wildlife-sanctuary-certify.
In the sky: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: A total lunar eclipse of the Harvest moon will occur beginning at 9:06 p.m. Sunday. The eclipse will be total at 10:10 p.m. and over by 12:27 a.m.
Mercury is low in the west around dusk. Bright-shining Venus is low in the east just before sunrise. Mars rises out of the east about an hour before sunrise. Jupiter is low in the east just before sunrise. Saturn appears in the southwest at dusk and sets around midnight.
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