Purple Martins
What Better Time Than Winter To Build A Nest Box.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission website has directions for building several types of nest boxes for our local birds.
See Myfwc.com and search for “nest box”. Also, don’t forget to provide dense native shrubs like wild lime, and Florida privet for nest builders.
My favorite is the purple martin house. Go to purplemartin.org for full details and the latest research results. It is best to purchase a metal purple martin house which looks like a small apartment building.Wood gets really heavy.
Get the easy to lower pole so that you can check the chicks each week for parasites without breaking your back. You may need to change the straw bedding too.
Predators include owls, hawks, raccoons, squirrels, snakes, crows and gulls. You may want to modify an existing house, see above website, or make one yourself.
The new dimensions are seven by seven by twelve inches deep. A divider in the middle with an offset 2.25 inch hole will make it hard for predators to reach in and grab the birds. Only the back room will be used to raise the young.
The house must be painted white to reflect sunlight and keep it cooler. The male purple martin will defend the neighboring compartments, preventing others from nesting next door. Attach a divider between entrances on the outside. Good fences make good neighbors.
Placing the house on a 10 to 20 foot pole a mere 30 to 100 feet from your home and 40 feet from the nearest tree or wire (squirrels) will not only bring the viewing closer to you but also provide protection of the nests by your nearby presence.
It will be easier for you to scare away predators and control starlings and house sparrows that may occupy the nests. These are legally unprotected, non native birds that should be removed.
Place a guard on the pole to keep off raccoons and grease a small section to stop fire ants from climbing up to the chicks.
Older martins will begin to arrive in February but are only passing through on their way to last year’s nests. The yearlings will arrive about a month later and continue thru June.
They are the ones to discover and use your new nest box. The entrances should be left open until September the first year.
This year’s young, on their way to South America for the winter, will notice them and return the next spring. Once established, the house can be taken down in June and stored until February.
A combination of houses and gourds should total 24 individual nests in order to make a sustainable colony. These birds are totally dependent on the one million humans that provide them with nest homes. It is great to talk with other nest providers and share knowledge and friendships.
Now imagine looking out of your favorite picture window and seeing dozens of these large swallows swooping, darting, diving, and stopping to feed their young.
What an exhilarating sight to see each spring and to know that each bird that you are seeing was added to the population by your efforts.
Predatory Insects
Antlions And Tiger Beetles And Waterbears, Oh My!
Your yard is a miniature jungle with predators searching for prey. A child will often notice predatory insects and spend hours watching them hunt.
Ladybird beetles, spiders, dragonflies and praying mantis are just a few of the cool bugs that kids like to watch.
The larva of the antlion is called a doodlebug. This quarter inch larva, that looks like Jaba the Hut with long pinchers for mouthparts, digs a three-inch wide, cone shaped pit in loose sand.
These are found under eaves and other dry sandy places. Ants and other insects that start across this trap slide down the cone to the center and are met by this star wars-like creature.
Tiger beetles are shiny green or black with long legs and a half-inch body. They are found on dirt roads and on the beach. You may notice them running just ahead of you.
The larva lives in a vertical tube in the ground and catches passing prey. The adult runs down small insects. Robber flies, which are the same size as the tiger beetle, yet gray and hunch-backed, also fly ahead of you. They feed on deer and horse flies, so consider them to be your best friends.
Water Bears” are one-millimeter sized scorpion relatives that live in moss and other wet environments. They look like bears and eat algae and tiny creatures by first stabbing them with their walrus-like tusks.
Put a drop of water from a patch of wet moss on a microscope slide for a real safari of weird creatures.
If you have aphids on your roses, take a close look and you may see several predators controlling them for you. Orange and black lady beetle larva, green syrphid fly maggots, and lace wing larva are usually seen feeding among their aphid prey.
The brown groups of aphids are ones that were parasitized by tiny braconid wasps and are now empty shells.
By providing areas in your yard planted with native trees, shrubs and wildflowers, you can support a thriving population of predatory insects.
You can then reduce or stop using pesticides. If you start spraying pesticides again you may have to continue spot treatments, where pests erupt, until a balance of predators and prey are achieved again.
Plant Now
March is the time to plant your native garden and get a full spring, summer and fall season of growth. By next winter your plants will be fully established and bearing fruit for our winter resident and migratory birds.
Spring rains make establishment easier with just a bit of additional water and fertilizer needed to encourage root growth. There are several habitats to copy including pinelands, wetlands, oak hammock, scrub and coastal hammock.
Try to match your plants to the habitat they occur in. “Plants from around the world” sounds great yet leaves me as well as local wildlife confused.
Birds know where and when to nest and what to feed on when surrounded by the plants that they have evolved with for tens of thousands of years.
Some tropicals fruit earlier than our natives and thus encourage birds to nest too early. This is more of a problem up north where something like Japanese honeysuckle may fruit early and encourage birds to nest in its branches that are open to predators.
For a tropical look, try our native subtropical trees, shrubs and wildflowers. These are plants that have naturally entered our state from the south.
Try planting a mix of gumbo limbo, mastic, pigeon plum, paradise tree, redbay, black ironwood and live oak. Mix in wild coffee, marlberry, wild lime, limber and Jamaica caper, firebush, necklace pod and all of the stoppers.
For colorful ground covers add red salvia, spiderwort, seaside goldenrod, dicliptera, Chapman’s cassia, Key’s porterweed, beach verbena and dune sunflower. Corky passionvine and coontie will provide food for butterfly larva.
In fact the above list will provide larval food for 13 different species of butterflies as well as year round berries for your birds.
If you have a wide swale out front, this is a great place to add even more trees and reduce turf grass. For permission to plant within unincorporated Palm Beach County, simply go to the third floor of the government building located at 2300 north Jog Rd. and obtain a landscape and irrigation permit application. Jim Peters will patiently answer your questions.
Of course, check your local city and homeowners rules and make sure your underground lines are marked before digging. Call 811 before digging, no kidding; it’s expensive if you don’t.
Remember those beautiful billowy masses of pink flowers on muhly grass last summer among our roadside plantings. Do try this at home. Don’t dig up turf, just cover with newspaper or cardboard and mulch; plant in it after a couple of weeks when the turf has died.
Imagine a tree lined street that is cool, quiet and has interesting birds to observe. How many of us have grown up in this setting and yet can’t imagine it in our own yards? Enjoy your spring planting season.
Nest Boxes
A Nest Box Is A Cheep Way To Increase Our Bird Population.
One spring, as a child, I watched a pair of Cardinals raise their young in a bush outside of our dining room window. I will never forget this interesting event.
Thickets of shrubs and brush piles are potential nesting sites for songbirds. Herons nest in cypress and pond apple trees near a pond and Terns will hide their eggs among the gravel on a flat roof near the ocean.
Dead trees, if away from the house or cut to a 10-20 foot stump, will decompose slowly and are used by woodpeckers and later by other birds including owls, or wood ducks if near a pond.
My 20-foot australian pine stumps became powdery and crumbled slowly to the ground. They were a favorite nesting and feeding site for local woodpeckers.
The Screech Owl’s box will attract wood ducks and squirrels also. These small owls like to live in town where they find insects, mice and lizards to eat. Place their nest box twelve feet high in your oak tree and they will find it.
Wood ducks will use this box if it is placed near a pond. It is great fun to watch the newly hatched chicks plop 12 feet to the ground where they join mom as she leads them to water. She’ll be on the ground calling to them when this occurs. The pileated woodpecker will occasionally sleep in one of these boxes.
The purple martin house looks like an apartment building on a 16-foot pole. Place next to a lake or in an open field 40 feet from the nearest tree so that squirrels can’t jump to it and eat the eggs.
These birds eat a lot of insects and are thrilling to watch as they swoop for their prey. Paint your martin house white so that it stays cool.
The martin population has increased over the years only because people have built nest boxes for them. See the article on purple martins for more information.
There may be plenty of food in your yard, but the birds will leave if they can’t nest there. Many birds cannot reproduce each year for lack of nest sites, so you will be helping to increase their numbers.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has nest box dimensions. Search for “nest box.”
Now for the part that all cat lovers like to hear. Cats that roam free will eat 90 percent of nearby fledgling birds.
Because these young birds are slow and often end up on the ground flapping about, they attract too much attention and are just plain irresistible to predators.
Cats are an efficient predator from North Africa and will hunt no matter how well fed they are. Indoor cats live for 10 years and outdoor cats for three on average so it is best for the birds and cats if the cats stay indoors.
With coyotes expanding their range, even into cities, this may become a mute point.
Natural Areas of Florida
Spend Time In Our County’s Natural Areas And Become An Expert Landscape Designer.
The Palm Beach County Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society recently had their “Open Garden Day”. These homeowner-designed yards were a real treat with lush native vegetation, winding paths and very little to no lawn.
The quarter acre yard of Phil and Ann Weinrich, who have lived in eastern Lake Worth for 25 years, has over 100 species of native plants and is visited by over 100 species of birds throughout the year.
Their Jamaica caper and Simpson stoppers are in full bloom with sweet smelling flowers. They only water their short ground covers once a week during the dry spell and not at all the rest of the year. Phil takes 15 minutes to mow every few weeks with a quiet electric mower.
Visiting natural areas with the same soil conditions as your neighborhood will give you ideas of what to use in your yard and which plants go best together.
Pines and saw palmetto can be used for dry pinelands, cypress and giant leather fern for wetlands, or the many species of our maritime hammocks are examples of what to use.
Learn at least some of our native plants before you start. The best compliment someone can give you is ” did you landscape your yard or just preserve these beautiful plants when building”.
Marlberry, will produce one half gallon of pea-sized black fruit on just an eight foot shrub. These will feed the catbirds and other migrating birds from March to May.
Mulberry, gumbo limbo, elderberry, Florida privet, cocoplum and beautyberry have taken turns feeding our local birds during the spring and summer.
Cedar waxwings pass through in the spring, feeding on strangler fig and mulberries. Blackpoll, black-throated blue and the common yellowthroat warblers may also be seen.
My favorite, though, is the American redstart. This warbler has yellow patches on the tail of the gray female and orange patches on the tail of the black male.
A group of these birds will hold your attention as they move through trees and shrubs while flashing open their tails, revealing their bright colors, to scare up insects. I enjoy hearing their bills snap when shutting on a bug.
The most interesting plantings that I have observed are ones that were created by people who simply imitated the natural groupings of plants found in their local natural areas.
You’d be surprised at how creative your landscaping becomes when inspired by a local preserve.
Native Palms
When planning a new landscape, don’t forget our native palms and the berries, insects and nest sites that they provide our local wildlife. Even a dead palm is a great site for local woodpeckers to carve out a nest hole.
Native palms can be combined with each other and plants of the same habitat for a tropical look. For a piece of the Florida Keys try a variety of thatch palms and other Keys plants.
For wet areas mix everglades palm, needle palm and royal palm with red maple, and giant leather fern. Saw palmetto can be mixed with slash pine or planted next to your home, while sabal palms can go anywhere.
I enjoy walking out my front door into a forest of sabal palms, red bay and other palms and shrubs. It is easy to view birds from our windows and the shade keeps our home cooler. Once established, there is no need to water and the shade keeps weeds out.
One way to make the most of your palms is to plant corky stem passion vine next to them. This native will grow among the boots and provide larval food for the zebra longwing, fritillaries and Julia butterflies. It is beautiful to watch these butterflies hover around the plant.
The viney snowberry will also grow on palms with its white fruit cascading from the boots. The bell shaped flowers are cream colored and fragrant and attract a variety of nectaring butterflies.
While visiting friends, we watched a pair of red bellied woodpeckers bring food to their young hidden inside a hole in a dead Christmas palm.
Coopers hawks nest in the top fronds of a sabal palm near our home each year. Even bats roost in them during the day before flying out at night to clear the skies of insect pests.
Did you know that the honey made from the nectar of the saw palmetto flower is the most flavorful in Florida? Many butterflies including the atala hairstreak also nectar on these flowers. Many native bees and other pollinators visit the flowers too.
The end of April brought a swarm of migrating warblers and other birds through our area. The redstarts and other warblers fly under the leaves of palms to scare out blue leafhoppers which are snapped up as they try to fly off.
Bud aphids provided a more leisurely eaten meal. It was exciting to see indigo buntings, a Baltimore oriole, parula warblers and others passing through and possibly feeding on them.
If your palms are planted in the right situation, they will need no care once established. Old fronds are good wildlife havens and will snap or fall off when ready.
Native palms hold up well in a hurricane which is why original Floridian yards utilized them often. And what says Florida more than sabal palms and saw palmetto in your yard?
Morning Sounds
The low hoots of two great horned owls bring me to my senses as the sun begins to rise. The sounds of warbling painted buntings can be heard from several portions of the yard.
Blue jays squawk, a hummingbird chatters as it visits firebush flowers and then flies off to pick tiny insects from the pineland privet flowers out front.
The calls of several male cardinals cascade from their scattered perches across our yard and the wooded lot next door. Catbirds hide in the marlberry where they feed on its tasty black berries and give an occasional mew like call.
Of course the mockingbirds add their two cents worth with a mishmash of repeated calls. Like hollow bamboo sticks rubbed on a wooden fence, the red bellied woodpecker’s call creates the feel of a haunted forest.
The pileated woodpecker is still within the large nest hole that she has excavated in a dead pine. Soon she will emerge and cackle loudly while flying off to dig out grubs in other dead pines.
Several warblers are about, yet the blue gray gnat catcher is the most extroverted and often comes close if you make a phish, phish, phish, phish, phish sound.
To finish off the mix, a pair of wood ducks whistle from on top of their nest box. Within a few hours after hatching in April the chicks will drop to the ground and make a mad dash with mom to the neighbor’s pond. A hawk may be watching.
Although it seems strange, a cardinal is building her nest six feet from the house in a prickly nickerbean vine. Our presence seems to scare off predators like hawks and definitely scares off feral cats which are a serious danger to fledglings.
Even though feeders are used, the natural abundance of seeds, insects and fruit feed migrating birds and keep some of them in our yard all winter.
Unfortunately, our winter resident birds will be heading north in May. Yet a few residents like cardinals and blue jays will entertain us until fall.
Although the feeders remain empty during the summer, we always have a bird bath with a quarter inch tube connected to it coming from a timer mounted to an outdoor faucet. This comes on for an hour each day and only needs to drip slowly in order to attract birds.
A yard planted with a variety of native plants may be the only place for many acres where birds can find the food, water and cover that they need. You will be surprised by the number and variety of birds that come, making an early morning walk around the yard very exciting.
Irruptive And Uncommon Birds
Irruptive birds are unpredictable and may not return to our area each year. They visit from north and central Florida between December and spring only if their food supply runs out.
Robins and cedar waxwings are the most common species to suddenly show up in large numbers. Both are noisy and will mug a poor bush or tree containing ripe fruit.
Listen! do you hear the srrree… chuck, chuck, chuck call of the robins? You can see the red breast and white band at the base of their tail as they fly overhead. An even larger flock of cedar waxwings may pass overhead with their high pitched trilled whistle.
There may be dozens or hundreds of them. This bird has a crest like the slightly smaller cardinal yet is greenish-brown with a black mask. Look in the native strangler fig, and unfortunately -because they spread the seed- the invasive indian laurel fig, and you will find many of these birds feeding on the ripe fruit.
Another thrush, like the robin, is the eastern bluebird. The blue back and red chest of this bird will bring back fond memories to those who have grown up in the country.
Pine flatwoods and open pasture are preferred and a nest box will greatly improve your chances of seeing one. Don’t forget to keep the starlings out of the nest box.
Rare visitors include the hermit thrush, with a brown back and spotted breast; the blue and yellow northern parula warbler; the red male and yellow-orange female of the summer tanager; and the great crested flycatcher.
This rather large, nine inch bird sports a long rufous tail, yellow belly and can be seen high up in trees as it sallies out to catch insects.
They hang out in gumbo limbo trees where they eat the fruit in the spring and are not found in the open. You can attract them with a nest box placed in such a way that squirrels and snakes can’t get to it. Remove starlings as they begin to invade the nest box.
Native plants that are fruiting in winter and early spring include marlberry, wild coffee, dahoon holly, beautyberry, pineland privet, rouge plant, white stopper, native strangler fig, snowberry, wax myrtle, southern red cedar and firebush.
Keep your ears perked, eyes sharp and your binoculars out during harsh winter weather and you may see some interesting birds that won’t return for a couple to many years.
Invasive Exotic Plants
Invasive Exotic Plants Are Not Welcome In My Backyard And Are Harmful To Local Wildlife.
I was recently asked, “So what is wrong with invasive exotic plants; they look beautiful, do well, and provide fruit and flowers for wildlife?”
The answer is that over thousands of years the flowering and fruiting of our native plants have become fine-tuned to match the needs of local and migrating birds.
Caterpillars eat young spring growth and are fed to nestlings by their parents. Successful exotics are often invasive. They crowd out natives, resulting in less variety of fruit, seeds and nuts for birds to eat during the year.
Think of Brazilian pepper; its berries are bird junk food for a short time of the year and the foliage doesn’t support insects for birds to eat the rest of the year. It is unsuitable to nest in due to its open growth which leaves chicks exposed to predators.
Palm Beach County spends over two million dollars a year removing exotic plants from our natural areas and I’ll bet that many of you just spent hundreds or thousands of dollars removing invasive plants from your property.
Maybe you spent another hour trying to pull up that Purple Shower plant that is now firmly established in your lawn and flower beds. This weed invades wetlands, is now a problem in Everglades National Park and is resistant to Roundup.
Just go to your local garden store and there it is being sold as “Florida Friendly”. I cringe when I see this category 1 invasive plant being used in so called “Butterfly Gardens” and local parks.
What you can do to stop the sale of invasive plants is simple. Go to FLEPPC.org and download the list of invasive plants. Then remove what you have and don’t buy any more.
It is up to you because if you buy it, someone will grow and sell it. The nursery industry, on its own, has stopped producing many invasive plants like carrotwood and earleaf acacia. Yet who can blame them for growing and selling something invasive that people ask for regularly?….. Well, actually, I can.
Not all exotic plants are bad. Bougainvillea, roses, petrea and crape myrtle don’t spread by seed or underground roots, so it is possible to have the added color of flowering exotics without the guilt.
You can make a difference in how our tax and personal money is spent on exotic plant removal by not buying invasive plants and removing the ones that you have before they spread to a local natural area.
Inspirations for native landscapes
There are no set rules for how to landscape your yard. Find what you like in nature and incorporate this into your landscape at home. This is an exciting time in which people are trying new landscape ideas with wildlife, water use and global warming in mind.
When visiting natural areas for ideas, notice the spacing of larger trees and the combinations of understory trees, shrubs and ground covers.
You may have to look at several locations before the right one is found to copy in your yard. Keep in mind that many preserves have invasives or are not managed properly.
Pine forest is often succeeded by oaks in the absence of fire. Just keep your oaks separated from the pines if you are creating a pine flatwoods theme or the oaks will shade out your pines over time.
I personally like the look of tall pines with a low understory of native grasses, wildflowers and groups of shrubs like sawpalmetto, myrsine and dahoon holly. Use these shrubs and low plants to create winding paths and connected open areas.
You may want to plant a coastal hammock near your house for a subtopical look that fits with your neighborhood.
Gumbo limbo, paradise tree, mastic, Spanish stopper, wild coffee, marlberry, Jamaica caper and others provide a “tropical” look near the house and front yard that blends in nicely with most manicured neighborhoods.
It is no longer considered unusual to plant slash pine and saw palmetto in the front yard as more people become familiar with these plants. If you are lucky, many native pines, oaks and cypress will be preserved in your neighborhood and you can stay with this theme anywhere on the property.
Do not fall into the trap of copying what you see around you. You don’t want to plant a foundation planting to hide your basement windows because you don’t have any basement windows.
Small groupings of shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers are all that is needed. Don’t be afraid to leave bare areas with mulch which will be replaced by leaves from your trees later on.
Brown is not a bad color and even dead palm fronds provide hiding places for birds and other beneficial wildlife. We square off, hack at, pick at and over- water most of our poor plants until they are ruined.
Think of all the lollypopped oak trees out there and pines that have died from irrigation water. The hurricanes simply finished them off. Don’t get me started on this pine beetle nonsense either, it’s just a scape goat.
Views are very important but in some cases your personal view of your outside view may need a review. For instance the view of your lake edge can be improved with tall cypress, pines, oaks and maple.
The trunks will frame the view out of your picture window and give you a little privacy as well. Maybe your neighbors across the lake will return the favor and give you something other than their barbeque grill and trash bins to look at.
Does yippy come running out and bark at you from across the lake every time you go out back?
A clear site to the front door is often important. This helps in crime prevention and makes the late night walk from the car to the front door a lot less scary for some. This is up to you; some people would rather enclose the front and have the privacy.
When considering wildlife, you may want to have several kinds of shrubs that fruit at different times. This way your birds will always have food and the moisture that berries provide.
A bird bath with a drip line connected to a timer and hose bib is very important. The water is refreshed each day and you can be sure to see the birds as they get used to the time of day that this comes on.
Make sure there are shrubs around the bath so that the birds can escape into them from hawks. Keep your cat indoors.
Cats are native to Africa and it is just not fair to place an efficient, nonnative, unnaturally abundant killer in the yard. Leave a six foot ring of bare ground around the bath so that the neighbor’s cat can’t hide easily.
The best book that I have found is “American Woodland Garden” by Rick Darke, Timber Press. This book will show you ways to appreciate the beauty of nature and has been very inspiring to me.
The best compliment that someone can give you on your yard is “did you landscape this yard or just leave the beautiful plants that occurred here when you built.”