January is an interesting month in North Florida if you are into gardening and nature. The temperatures fluctuate wildly, yet all my azaleas are in full bloom along with the camellias. It’s as though spring has come prematurely, and you need a jacket to enjoy it.
Aside from the flowers in bloom, my favorite part of January in North Florida has become backyard bird watching. That’s because several backyard birds migrate here for the winter. They started showing up in November and will be around until spring. It’s a bird bonanza right now and it takes very little effort to welcome them to your yard.
Adding a bird bath to your garden will help attract birds to your yard.
To get started, you need to provide water, food, and shelter. Two years ago, I got a birdbath as a Christmas gift. At the time, I just thought it would be a nice garden ornament. Being new to Florida, I had no idea that it was migration season. I was in for a treat! I came home for lunch a couple weeks later and discovered a flock of cedar waxwings in the yard. There were at least a dozen, either on the bath or perched on the fence waiting their turn with more in the trees next door. They were a delight to watch. Cedar waxwings arrive in the winter and can travel in very large flocks. They love fruit and berries and forage on them voraciously. They even sometimes become intoxicated from eating overripe fruits. Unfortunately, they don’t always visit the same stops year after year, and I have not seen a flock like that in my yard since.
Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting 14 American robins in my birdbath. By the end of the day, the bath was totally dry from all the drinking and splashing. The American robin is a friend that I had taken for granted. They are year-round residents in Tennessee, where I lived before migrating myself, and I saw them nearly every day in Memphis. But here, they are winter visitors. They travel in nomadic flocks and enjoy insects, earthworms, and birdseed in your feeders.
Speaking of feeders, I am sure you have seen videos from birdfeeders with built-in motion-activated cameras. Those are a little pricey, so I purchased a clear birdfeeder with suction cups and attached it to the living room window. I filled it with a mix of white proso millet, shelled peanuts, and sunflower seeds. It took a few days for the birds to find it, but now I can sit quietly in the living room with my morning coffee and look right over to enjoy the beautiful red house finches. The house finch is a year-round bird in North Florida. Its natural range was the Western United States and Mexico, but in the 1940s, they were released from the pet trade in New York, and eventually made their home here. Another small bird, the house wren, flies south to Florida in winter. But you are unlikely to see it at your feeder as they are insectivorous.
So, what about the birds that aren’t interested in your seeds? What can we do to attract them? The answer lies in planting native trees, shrubs, and flowers. This is supposed to be a gardening column, after all. For those birds that rely on insects, native trees and shrubs provide more insects than non-native trees and shrubs, as a general rule. Native oak trees are especially wonderful at providing insects for the feathered friends, and the trees can withstand large loads of insects. For those birds like the cedar waxwings that love fruit and berries, native trees such as Chickasaw plum, persimmon, red mulberry, holly, and sabal palm are a draw. Shrubs like Simpson’s stopper, beautyberry, wild coffee, native blueberry, and seagrape produce berries for foraging. Even naturalized perennials like blanketflower can be an excellent source for seeds this time of year. Plant your natives in layers with varying heights to provide shelter and resting areas for a wide variety of birds.
It’s not too late to enjoy the lively winter bird season. Add a bath or feeder this weekend. You could be enjoying visitors in just a few days.
Tonya Ashworth is an extension agent and environmental horticulture and Master Gardener coordinator with UF/IFAS in Duval County.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Backyard bird watching in Florida: Guide to getting started