Photo: Brush Pile, Joanne Bauer
By Deidra Bryant
Depending on where you live, you might start to notice a drop in temperature as the foliage from your shrubs and trees starts to change color. Cool breezes are also starting to pick up, leaving stray twigs and small branches on your lawn. Many special techniques, some borrowed from traditional gardening and some unique to habitat gardening and landscaping can be employed by backyard bird watchers to enhance a property for use by birds. Brush pile composition is one of them!
Brush piles are highly attractive to a wide variety of birds, as they increase moisture and add nutrients to the soil attracting invertebrates. As a result, expect sparrow and wren species to spend long hours exploring the tangles for their next scrap of food. As the name implies, brush piles can be a simple pile made up of all your tree and shrub trimmings, pulled weeds, fallen branches or dried tomato and cucumber vines from a vegetable garden. There is a simple construction technique for vastly improving the usefulness of a brush pile for a wider array of wildlife by creating more diverse openings under the pile. It can be as simple as piling your clippings in some out-of-the-way location at the back of the property. Or, it can be as complex as having a planned layering of long alternating rows of prunings and small branches. The best brush piles, from a wildlife perspective, are those that allow a honeycomb of open spaces inside among the various elements. Those become places where birds and other small wildlife can hide, rest and escape from predators.
To create your brush pile:
Lay down a crisscrossing pattern of 5-inch diameter logs on the chosen spot as a base. You may also use a wooden pallet if you have one already.
Mound all available sticks, limbs, vines and such, atop the second layer, allowing them to spill over the logs to the ground.
Continue adding trimmings from your trees and shrubs to build up the brush pile. As each layer of larger branches or logs is concealed, put on another layer until your pile is as high as you’d like. The finished brush pile will look like a dry-land beaver lodge without the mud.
If you have any clipped evergreen branches, you can place those on top to conceal the interior.
Your wildlife visitors will greatly appreciate your work of art throughout the fall and winter! Just make sure that your pile is far away from any sources of fire.