To Feed the Birds, First Feed the Bugs

Doug Tallamy and his wife, Cindy, built their house seven years ago in the middle of 10 acres of former hayfields.

But they don’t sit inside much. Most of their spare time is spent cutting Oriental bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle out of cherry and oak trees. They saw down thickets of autumn olive and multiflora rose and paint the cut stems with an herbicide that goes down into the roots and kills them.

The land was so thick with multiflora rose that they couldn’t walk, so Mr. Tallamy cut paths with hand loppers. They work with handsaws, not a chain saw. And they paint on the herbicide, rather than spraying it, because they don’t want to damage the treasures below: under those thorny rose bushes might be seedlings of black oak, Florida dogwood, black gum or arrowwood viburnum, which, if protected from deer, could flourish in the cleared space.

A meadow cleared of autumn olive can resprout with goldenrod, joe-pye weed, milkweed, black-eyed Susans and many other natives crucial to wildlife.

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