Photo: Gray Catbird with Beautyberry, Will Stuart
By Deidra Bryant
The dog days of summer are behind us, and as our avian migrants prepare for their long and arduous trek towards their wintering grounds, you might wonder what things you and your family can do for your native bird habitat to facilitate their journey.
Although it’s still too early to see those beautiful crimson leaves senesce within your neighborhood, colorful fruits are still abundant on many woody plants. As you may already know, birds show individual preferences for various fruit-producing plants. For example, they will select fruits they like best (such as Cornus, Rubus, and Vaccinium spp), clean them off early in the season, and let fruit they find less tasty hang onto other plants. Here are a few plants to consider purchasing if you enjoy observing birds nibble on fresh fruit within resplendent autumn foliage.
American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana L.) is a native perennial understory shrub that produces clusters of tiny magenta drupes that ring around their woody stems in late August and September. The berries have a high moisture content and serve as an important food source for many passerines such as the Northern Cardinal, Purple Finch, Northern Mockingbird, Eastern Towhee and Brown Thrasher.
Persimmons - whose genus loosely means “fruit of the Gods”- are one of the most favored fruits in Asia. However, they tend to be under-appreciated in North America. The American persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) is a large tree native to much of the eastern United States and grows vibrant orange berries (yes, the fruit is morphologically a berry!) As with Asian persimmons, the American persimmon produces delicious fruit in the fall which becomes an excellent food source for birds once they are ripe. In fact, this fruit becomes more palatable, softer and sweeter only after a couple of light autumn frosts.
Other fruiting plants to consider include American holly and Blackhaw. By adding “less-desired” species to your habitat, you’ll be stocking your feathered friends’ pantry for the late winter when berries they passed up become life-saving food stores. Birds that rely on insects in the warmer months often rely on berries when the weather turns brisk. These include woodpeckers, robins, waxwings, thrashers, mockingbirds, catbirds, thrushes, bluebirds, chickadees and titmice. So, as you clean out those nest boxes and make your brush piles, consider planting these captivating native plants in your yard next spring. You might even encounter a new visitor!