If you love birds, you have to love bugs

When I dive into something, I seem to really dive. For the past handful of years it has been removing invasives wherever we can and replacing them with native plants instead. Because I love animals. Yes, the plants we choose are important to the wild animals that we love.

My husband, Josh, and I absolutely adore wildlife. Joshua has a thing for birds. He enjoys feeding them, watching them, talking to them, giving them made up names, creating fancy water features for them, and even goes as far as extending verbal invitations to wild birds we see in other states to our yard. Thankfully none of them have taken him up on his offer because he has done this at least a million times.

A male American goldfinch feeding one of his young in our backyard. 

When you love birds you have to also love bugs. That last sentence made you shake your head, didn't it? Well, birds want to live in a place where they can safely nest and raise their young, right? And what do they feed their young? Almost every single species of bird feeds their hatchlings insects. In fact, I recently learned of a study where scientists counted how many insects a nesting pair of chickadees fed their young until they fledged. A nest of chickadee babies needed to be fed between 3,000 and 9,000 insects, mostly caterpillars, to be strong enough to fly from their nest. That is a lot of insects for just one nest of tiny birds. So if we need insects in our yards for our beloved wild birds to feed their babies, what should we grow? Native plants. Plants that naturally grow and thrive where we live have the best odds of not only attracting native insects, but also withstanding the nibbling of those insects. These native plants have evolved being part of this natural cycle.

A monarch caterpillar on a swamp milkweed leaf from our backyard. Monarch butterflies will only lay eggs on milkweed plants so it is important that we grow them and protect the plants. 

Where it all started

The very first native plant piece I ever made was a pair of Turk's Cap Lily earrings, years ago now. I did not know it at the time, but those earrings were the beginning of an obsession I am still deep in. Those wonderfully spotty orange flowers often attract butterflies from the swallowtail family, sometimes growing up to eight feet tall, enticing native butterflies to sip from their unique speckled blooms. Keeping the butterflies happy encourages them to stick around and lay their eggs. Some caterpillars grow up into new wonderful beings. Some become a healthy food source for that nest full of baby cardinals you have been smiling at in your backyard. I sold that original pair a long time ago, but I think about them often, since that little lily is really where all of this began.

A few more native plants I have fallen for since

That first lily opened a door, and I have not been able to close it since. Here are a few of the native spring ephemerals and their small insect neighbors that have found their way into my work.

Round-Leaved Violet Jewelry Set
Round-leaved yellow violets are one of the earliest spring ephemerals to bloom, which matters more than it sounds like. Great spangled fritillary butterflies lay their eggs near violets specifically, because violets are the only plant their caterpillars will eat. No violets, no fritillaries. This set carries a tiny hand carved ant on it too, since ants are one of the main reasons violets spread at all, carrying their oily little seeds off to new patches of forest floor.

Yellow Trout Lily Shadowbox Bracelet
Trout lilies are patient in a way that puts most of us to shame. A single plant can take four to seven years just to grow its first flower, spending all that early time as a single mottled leaf slowly building up energy underground. Once you know that, a patch of blooming trout lilies in the woods starts to look like a small miracle rather than just a pretty spring flower.

Crab Spider and Rue Anemone Necklace
Crab spiders are the ambush predators of the wildflower world. They do not spin webs to catch prey, they sit right out in the open on a flower and wait, and some species can actually shift their own color over a few days to better match the bloom they are hiding on. The rue anemone this one sits on is a fittingly delicate stage for that kind of quiet patience.

Bee Fly and Bloodroot Leaf Earrings
Bee flies look and sound exactly like tiny fuzzy bees, hovering and darting the same way, but they are true flies wearing a very convincing disguise. It is a great survival trick, since most predators leave them alone assuming they can sting. Bloodroot, the flower they are paired with here, has its own trick too, a red sap in its roots and stems that early settlers and Indigenous peoples used as a dye.

Bloodroot Leaf Earrings
Bloodroot flowers only stay open for a day or two before dropping their petals, which makes them one of the most fleeting spring ephemerals out there. They rely almost entirely on early spring bees and flies for pollination, since their bloom window is so short there is no time to waste.

Spring Beauty Mining Bee Necklace
Some mining bees are what scientists call pollen specialists, meaning they will only collect pollen from spring beauty flowers and nothing else. The bee and the flower need each other completely. If the spring beauties disappear from a patch of woods, so do the bees that depend on them.

Tiny Ant on Her Bloodroot Pin
Bloodroot is another plant that relies on ants for seed dispersal, thanks to a fatty little appendage on the seed called an elaiosome, essentially a snack the ant carries the seed home for. The ant eats the fatty part and discards the seed nearby, and a new bloodroot plant gets a free ride to a new patch of forest.

Be well!

Tamara