Songbird Gardens
The American Goldfinch has exactly one brood of chicks each year. Concurrently each brood is limited to only eating seeds. 96% of infant and juvenile songbirds eat insects as their first food. Goldfinches are a rare outlier.
Songbird gardens are advanced level eco-gardening systems. Birds will breed in your habitat garden when rich biodiversity conditions exist. Providing a haven for butterflies and pollinators is an easier and quicker realized fête. This can be explained in part by the fact that birds are higher on the food chain than insects. Supporting insects well ultimately will translate to feeding the birds. Most birds eat insects.
Real Bird Gardens have native shrubs.
Although this may be true, the songbirds will only visit your butterfly garden or pollinator garden unless you continue adding more habitat value. Birds feel welcome to make their home somewhere only where dense layers of biomass occur. The native shrub layer is missing in most American suburban homesteads. As has been noted, if you’d like more songbirds around you need both a lower herbaceous layer of wildflowers for insects and some larger aerial height native woody species. Where else would they make nests and safely protect their young? Additionally, where (besides native shrub zones) can songbirds hide from predators? Those Red Tail Hawks and their peers are ruthless. “Bird Gardens” have hiding places in aerial layers mimicking the wild forest layers structure.
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