We were amazed to see a pileated woodpecker in our yard looking for insects in the logs lining our path. Even though I wasn’t very far away, he didn’t seem bothered by my presence and stayed quite a while. Unfortunately, he hasn’t often visited our yard, though we’ve spotted pileateds in other little forest-y areas nearby.
This yellow warbler in the joe-pye flower is likely looking for insects, not nectar. Insects are an essential food for most birds, as well as for frogs, toads, bats, and even other insects. (And we also raise mealworms for birds.)
Insects are also an essential link from plants to the animals that eat animals that eat insects, though we don’t have many of those larger animals in our suburban yard.
And other “meats”
Of course, there are “meats” other than insects and mealworms. For hawks, food isn’t insects, but other small birds and mammals. Yet hawks have to eat, too!
Yes, it is somewhat sad, but not as sad as the fact that humans have eliminated the habitat of so much wildlife!
(And cats — a non-native invader — don’t count as a benign predator!)
Native plants are key
Douglas Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home transformed my understanding of the role of native plants. Before, I had assumed that indigenous plants were important just because they belonged here, creating “a sense of place” or because they produced berries that birds obviously loved.
Now I understood why they’re crucial: native insects (for the most part) can eat only native plants, in other words, the plants they evolved with.
It may seem odd to say we want plants in our landscape that insects can eat. After all, gardeners have traditionally regarded insects as their enemy. But when we think about the food chain, we realize that the energy from the sun is what drives the whole system. Plants use energy from the sun to grow, creating food. By eating these plants and then by being eaten themselves, insects transfer the sun’s energy to the rest of the food web.
Insects are an important foundation of the entire food web.
We were fascinated by an example of this dynamic a few years ago.
While frantically looking for food to feed its little flock of demanding babies, this chickadee returned again and again to the patch of monardas along the roadside.
After he left, I went to see what was so appealing…
This is a closeup of the insect the chickadee discovered. Apparently there were lots of them in the monardas!
They provided food for the birds, but the plants were fine.
No native plants, no insects. No insects, no birds … nor many other creatures.
And here we humans — us, our children, our grandchildren and everyone else — here we sit at the tippy-top of this (increasingly unstable) system, totally dependent on it functioning properly for our own survival.
Yet by planting mostly non-native plants in our landscapes, we’re relentlessly digging away at the foundation under us.
Some insect food
We’ve seen these cicadas being chased by birds and sometimes caught and eaten, too. A tasty, nutritious meal for their nestlings.
We discovered these dogwood sawfly larvae eating our pagoda dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) seedlings. Though we have lots of dogwoods of various kinds, this is the first time we had seen these insects. After a little research, we discovered they were a native insect … and that they didn’t harm the plant.
Most interesting, though, is that most websites I visited for ID’ing them offered a list of pesticides to get rid of them — despite the fact that they stated that they didn’t harm the plant!
But when an insect doesn’t harm a plant, why would anyone want to spread poison around their yard just to prevent a few — or even many — nibbled leaves? We don’t have a sawfly problem on our other dogwoods, I assume because birds eat these tasty morsels.
We’ve also seen ads for pesticides that kill “parsley worms” — in other words, the larval phase of the beautiful black swallowtail butterfly.
And then people wonder why they don’t see butterflies any more!
The bottom line is that having a few nibbled leaves out of the millions of leaves in our yard really doesn’t bother us.
Without them, we wouldn’t have these beautiful butterflies … nor a healthy planet!
Places for wildlife to find insects
Leaf litter is a great place for some creatures to find food. (Of course, leaf litter is great for the soil, too, and a convenient way to “dispose of” your fall leaves instead of having them trucked away.)
Birds such as white-throated sparrows, for example, love to search for insects in the leaves. It’s fun to watch them do their little dance designed to unearth insects.
Toads probably like this area, too, but since they’re nocturnal we don’t often see them.
Logs are another good place to find insects. I’ve lined our paths with a variety of old logs, generally gathered from logs people put out to the curb.
There’s always insect activity in these logs as they decay. (And I’ve always found decomposing logs to be fascinating!)
A landscape in balance
Even herbaceous plants can house insects, especially if you leave them over the winter.
The gall on this goldenrod stem contains an insect, which can be nutritious food for a bird. One year in the fall I noted where this gall was and checked it again the following spring. The insect had left the gall — either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Because we don’t use pesticides (which kill insects indiscriminately — beneficial or not), we have insects for birds and other insect-eating creatures to eat.
At the same time, since birds, toads, and beneficial insects eat so many insects, we have very few insects left to bother us.
(This sign and others is available from Beyond Pesticides.)
Our yard seems to be nicely in balance.
Resources
- Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center:
- Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
Reflections
Our nearly universal animosity toward insects is understandable, but seriously misplaced. Of the 9 million or so insect species on earth, a mere 1% interact with humans in negative ways. The other 99% of the insect species pollinate plants, return the nutrients tied up in dead plants and animals to the soil, keep populations of insect herbivores in check, aerate and enrich the soil, and as I keep stressing, provide food either directly or indirectly for most other animals.
~ Douglas Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens
If you count all the terrestrial bird species in North America that rely on insects and other arthropods (typically the spiders that eat insects) to feed their young, you would find that figure to be about 96% — in other words, nearly all of them.
~ Douglas Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens
Animal substance seems to be the first food of all birds, even the granivorous tribes.
~ William Bartram, 1739 – 1823