Anchorage Daily News

It could be an ad for any house hunter:

Wanted: Safe, seasonal home in quiet neighborhood suitable for children; close to work and shopping; water feature a plus.

An ideal address for most people -- and all birds.

"They're no different from us," says Bonnie Lembo, whose home, a "certified wildlife habitat," is right spank in downtown Anchorage. "They all need secure places to live, something to eat and drink, a protected place to rear their nestlings."

Lembo and her husband, Bob Bundy, have spent 21 years welcoming birds, so by now far more of them than humans call this pleasant blue house and its gardens home.

It's early spring, snow still padding fence corners, and a dark-eyed junco is already splashing in a shallow terra cotta dish in the backyard, showering droplets onto enamel-yellow tulips and wine rhododendrons at the back door. A black-capped chickadee chitters from the fence. A magpie watches Lembo lift compost from bins in the kitchen garden to spread on strawberry beds.

Curving walks of pavers, flat stones and bark mulch divide small lawns and larger beds stair-stepped with plants layered in different heights: ground covers to low to mid to tall bushes, up to trees. A front-yard grove of spruce with understory cotoneasters hides the brush pile, something for every well-appointed wildlife refuge.

"The birds shelter in the branches," Lembo says. "And in the winter, it holds the snow, but the snow doesn't fill it, and the little winter birds creep in and are safe."

CHEMICAL-FREE

It wasn't always so. In 1984, the couple moved into a small Anchorage downtown house with a chain-link fence, stiff lawns, and trees and shrubs clawing one another for light and food. For three years they toed the conventional yard-care line of killing and poisoning, eradicating, mowing and edging, but then "I got sick of putting poison on stuff and went cold-turkey organic," Lembo says.

Within three more years, butterflies, dragonflies, bees, damselflies and birds had returned to what had been a sterile cul-de-sac.

The couple set out native plants like high-bush cranberries and nagoon berries, which make a low and determined ground cover. They put in raspberries and black currants, mountain ash for winter berries and lilacs for their seeds. They left seed-bearing plants standing in autumn for winter bird buffets. They put swallow houses high under the eaves on their home's sheltered south side and watched swallows plummet from them into the back yard to scoop up mosquitoes by the thousands.

They set out bird baths, lots of bird baths, but all gently sloping and shallow, and all at the end of a gradual approach from tree to lower branch to bush to bath. "Birds like to come down in steps and check out possible danger at every stop," Lembo says.

Songbirds don't like water higher than their tummies, so flat stones can be placed in birdbaths too deep for them. No gravel, though: That's too hard to clean, and the baths, like feeders, must be kept immaculate to prevent disease.

A shallow-water bonus: Butterflies and dragonflies like to rest and sip on flat stones a bit above the water. Butterflies are pollinators, and dragonflies feed voraciously on mosquito larvae.

WINTER TREATS

During winter, Lembo stocks multiple bird feeders with peanut butter, peanuts and birdseed. Each sunny window has a feeder view, though the feeders aren't close enough to the glass to spook the birds or lead to fatal fly-through attempts.

They don't leave out water or the bird baths in winter, though.

"There's plenty of open water nearby for the birds, and I see them eat snow all the time," Lembo says.

They don't leave out food in late spring or summer either, because the birds then should be foraging and eating insects. Chickadees, for instance, are death on leaf rollers and aphids. When watering brings up insects, the birds are poised and waiting. Robins are especially alert to the sound of a sprinkler. It's like a dinner bell to them.

In winter, Bohemian waxwings swoop in en masse and strip the mountain ashes of their berries; irritable redpolls, swarming ground-feeders all, bicker and peck and boot each other over the feeder lip.

OCCASIONAL VIOLENCE

It's not all Disney bliss and peace. Last summer a raven hit the magpie nest in the spruce three times, each time carrying away, ripping apart and devouring one of the magpies' three naked nestlings.

"The parents were screaming and trying to drive it off, and every other magpie in the neighborhood came flying in to help, but the raven was just too big for them," Lembo says.

Squirrels find baby birds and bird eggs very much to their taste, "so we don't make this a welcoming spot for squirrels," she says.

Then there are cats. They kill birds. Lots of birds. It's their nature.

"Feral and domestic cats have made extinct every single species of ground-nesting bird in Hawaii," Lembo says. And during a time when a neighbor let the family cat roam freely, "I was finding headless birds here all the time."

Wise design and placement of birdhouses can keep birds and their babies safe. It's the cavity-dwelling birds that use birdhouses, not the nest builders, and the entrance hole should be just big enough for the species: 1 1/8 inches for a black-capped chickadee, 1½ inches for a hairy woodpecker, 2½ inches for a saw-whet owl. (The Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Nongame Wildlife Program has the definitive free publication, "Birdhouses for Alaska: A Guide to Building and Placing Birdhouses.")

Birdhouses should not have perches. The only thing that will use a perch in Alaska is a predator, to squat and peer into the nest, then reach. The inside should be rough, so baby birds can clamber out, and should never be painted. And the outside, if painted, should be a flat rather than glossy finish and a color that blends with the surroundings. It's good if a predator can't get in your birdhouse; it's better for it not to notice the house in the first place and give its occupants group heart attacks.

Over the years Lembo's yard has hosted an astonishing variety of birds, including a juvenile goshawk, Anna's hummingbirds, gray jays, Steller's jays ("They have voices like gears grinding"), Oregon juncos, red-breasted nuthatches, pine siskins, golden-crowned and white-crowned sparrows, swallows, red-eyed vireos, a host of warblers -- yellow, arctic, MacGillivray's and Wilson's -- and downy woodpeckers.

"An organic garden is a web of life: There's always something happening in it," Lembo says. "And the really amazing thing is, all this is happening right in downtown Anchorage."

ALASKA BIRDS: Anchorage Audubon Society has information on local birds, lectures and field trips. Monthly meetings resume in September.

anchorageaudubon.org

GET CERTIFIED: Learn from the National Wildlife Foundation how to create a backyard wildlife habitat and qualify for certification.

www.nwf.org/backyard

ADVERTISEMENT