Vol. 38, No. 18

3-14-2007
By: Julia Harris

This one's for the birds

Chadwick Arboretum takes birds under its wing

Chadwick Arboretum and Learning Gardens doesn’t receive a lot of visitors this time of year. Cold temperatures and the lack of blooming plants keep the crowds to a minimum.

But that’s all changed this winter thanks to a new program that has brought many new visitors to the garden.

The visitors — birds of all types — have flocked to the arboretum because of Buckeyes for Birds, a “feeding and greening” program started by two university horticulturists. The program has brought new life to the arboretum and allowed birds to survive during the tough winter months.

“I’ve been told that in terms of the extreme weather and the heavy snow cover, conditions haven’t been this bad for wildlife since 1978,” says Kathy Burkholder, a horticulturist at the arboretum.

The program involves decorating recycled Christmas trees with ornaments made of various bird food and treats. Burkholder came up with the idea after informal tours of local garden centers, combined with her past experience as Dublin’s parks horticulturist.

“I saw these star-shaped ornaments made of bird seed that people give as gifts,” she recalls. “And that started me thinking about Christmas trees, and how in Dublin we’d put evergreens in barrels for shopkeepers to decorate. It just went from there.”

Burkholder, her volunteers and Sharon Treaster, a veteran horticulturist with more than 29 years at Ohio State, scoured neighborhood sidewalks for Christmas trees after the holidays.

Before potting and placing the trees, Burkholder began experimenting with recipes for bird treats to hang on them. She researched the kinds of ingredients least likely to harm the birds and found some surprising information: Bread products can cause serious damage because the yeast in them can swell in a bird’s gizzard and kill it.

She also learned, through trial and error, that squirrels and raccoons are big fans of bird treats and need to be cajoled into leaving the food alone.

“Everything I hung on the trees at my house was totally stripped off within 24 to 48 hours,” Burkholder recalls.

One solution was to put out a pile of shelled corn a good distance away from the feeders, luring the squirrels away. Another idea was to mix large amounts of chili pepper into the bird seed — birds have no taste buds, but squirrels and raccoons do. Some of the hardier squirrels were not deterred by the potent flavor, Burkholder says, but most were.

In January, the Christmas trees procured by her volunteers were potted in sturdy containers and grouped on the arboretum grounds, beneath some larger shrubs to provide additional cover for the birds. The trees were hung with an assortment of treats.

Even though birds lack taste buds, they did not lack interest in the food, says Burkholder, particularly during the long and bitter cold spells when natural food sources are harder to find.

Because of the birds’ heavy use of the treats, it was a challenge to keep up with the demand. Burkholder and Treaster relied on volunteer groups and horticulture students to help them make more. A group of developmentally disabled adults also is being trained to make the treats as a form of therapy and community service.

“We wanted to make this a multidimensional project, something that would interest different groups of people and give us something out in the gardens during the winter months,” says Burkholder.

Her winter landscape, as she calls it, continues to attract both birds and humans, who are intrigued by the colorful treats and the evergreens themselves. Burkholder says the hope is that people will be interested in doing something similar to their own yards to help birds get through winter.

“It’s important to feed the birds at times when they can’t get food on their own, and that’s at least through March and probably into April and May,” adds Treaster.

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