What birds can you expect to see in a Maryland backyard? While every property is different with its own mix of birds, many are pretty typical. These are the Maryland backyard birds commonly seen in our central Maryland yard.
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One of the nicest gifts you can give the birds in your yard won’t cost you a dime. It’s a brush pile. While we might like to think that birds can eat safely at our backyard feeders, the birds we feed are in turn are often eaten by predators who come to feeders to find them. Brush piles give birds a quick place to flee when a hawk soars through the feeder area or a neighborhood cat saunters by.
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Get rid of House Sparrows with a DIY Anti House Sparrow Halo: This past winter brought a small flock of House Sparrows to my yard. This spring brought a little group of Eastern Bluebirds. House Sparrows compete with bluebirds for nest cavities. They kill bluebirds (eggs, nestlings and adults) in the nest and then build their own nest on top of them. So these non-native sparrows need to go.
You can find all my attempts to get these sparrows to move on in my “Deterring House Sparrows” post. But read on if you’d like more information on one my experiments: a DIY anti-House Sparrow bird feeder halo. This halo was inspired by the “Magic Halo” that folks at the University of Nebraska devised. If you poke around online, you’ll find lots of people have made their own versions of this device. This is how I made mine.
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