As the days shorten, billions of birds pour across the continent on their way south, and for a few precious weeks your yard can become something wonderful: a filling station for one of the planet's great migrations. Fall also means a whole new cast of winter residents may be arriving in your yard. Attracting birds in fall means catering to both crowds — the travelers passing through and the newcomers moving in.
The best autumn bird garden isn't the tidiest. In fact, some of the most powerful things you can do this season involve doing less. Here's how to make your patch of the world a place migrants can't afford to skip.
Your autumn audience
The first group of birds visiting are migrants — warblers, thrushes, sparrows, and countless others — burning through fat reserves as they head south. Your yard is their rest stop, a spot where they can get quick, high-energy food, water, and safe hiding spots while they recover before the next leg. Many will stay only a day or two.
The second group of birds are the winter residents just arriving. Depending on where you live, they may include Dark-eyed juncos, White-throated and White-crowned Sparrows, kinglets, and others settling in for the cold months. These birds are scouting for a reliable place to spend the winter, and the habitat you build now is the one they'll depend on when the weather is at its worst.
Fuel for the journey
Migration requires energy, and migrating birds eat with an urgency that borders on frantic. Autumn is the time to shift your offerings toward rich, high-energy foods:
- Suet is ideal as temperatures fall since its a dense energy source for woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, and more.
- Black-oil sunflower and peanuts deliver fat and calories in every bite; peanuts (in or out of the shell) are especially prized by jays, woodpeckers, and titmice.
- Nyjer keeps the goldfinches and any passing siskins happy.
Autumn is also the time to get your feeding station in shape for the season ahead: take feeders down, scrub them clean, repair or replace any that are cracked, and restock. As birds begin to concentrate at feeders, hygiene matters — clean feeders every week or two and rake up old hulls to keep diseases from spreading through the growing flocks.
Resist the urge to tidy
This is the single most important autumn message, and it may run your fall yard cleanup instincts: leave the garden standing.
When you cut back spent flowers, you're throwing away a winter's worth of bird food. The seed heads of coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, asters, sunflowers, and native grasses are exactly what sparrows, finches, and juncos will be eating on cold mornings. Leave the stalks up and you've built a natural feeder for the birds.
And leave the leaves. A layer of fallen leaves is not mess — it's habitat. Leaf litter shelters the insects, spiders, and pupae that overwinter there, and that hidden buffet is what ground-foraging birds like sparrows, towhees, and thrushes scratch through all seasons. Those same overwintering insects become the caterpillars and bugs that feed next spring's nestlings. Rake the leaves off your paths if you must, but let them lie under shrubs and in beds. Your birds — and next year's birds — will thank you.
Berries and the case for planting now
Fall is peak fruit season, and berry-laden shrubs are magnets for migrating thrushes, robins, waxwings, and catbirds refueling on the move. Not all berries are equal, though: the fruits of native plants like dogwood, spicebush, viburnum, winterberry, and serviceberry tend to be rich in the fats that migrants need for their journey, while many showy non-native shrubs offer sugary "junk food" that looks tempting but fuels a bird poorly. Planting natives — and pulling invasives — genuinely improves your yard’s food quality.
Autumn also happens to be a superb time to plant trees and shrubs. The cooler air and warm soil let roots establish before winter, giving your new plantings a head start next year. Every native berry bush or oak you put in this fall is an investment in the birds of springs to come.
Keep the water coming
Migrants are as thirsty as they are hungry, and a clean water source pulls in species that will never visit a feeder. Keep your birdbath full and refreshed through the fall, ideally with a little motion — a dripper or small fountain — to catch a passing traveler's eye. As the first frosts approach, this is the time to think ahead to winter: plan for a heated bath if your winters are cold, so you can offer that increasingly rare commodity, unfrozen water, when the hard weather comes.
Build shelter before the cold
The cover that hid nesting birds in summer becomes life-or-death insulation in the colder nights ahead. A brush pile assembled from fallen branches gives migrants a place to duck into and winter birds a windbreak in which to roost. Evergreens offer dense, sheltered roosting spots. And this is a good moment to clean out old nest boxes — emptying last season's nesting material — so they can serve as cold-weather roost boxes where birds huddle through frigid nights.
About those hummingbird feeders
A common autumn worry: Will leaving my hummingbird feeder keep the hummingbirds from migrating? It won't. Birds migrate on cues from the shortening day, not from the availability of a feeder, so you can't strand them by being generous. In fact, the opposite is true — leaving your nectar feeder up for about two weeks after you see your last hummingbird can be a lifeline for late stragglers passing through, who need every calorie for the road. Keep the nectar fresh, and take the feeder down once it's clearly gone quiet.
Migration's hidden danger: glass
Autumn migration comes with a sobering hazard. Enormous numbers of migrating birds die each year in collisions with windows, and autumn — with its rush of inexperienced young birds — is peak window strike season. Many migrants travel at night and can be drawn fatally off course by artificial light. You can help on both fronts: turn off unnecessary outdoor and indoor lights at night during migration (a growing number of "Lights Out" programs promote exactly this), and make your windows visible to birds with exterior screens, decals, or patterns spaced a couple of inches apart. And as always, keep cats indoors — tired, unfamiliar migrants resting in your yard are especially easy targets.
Your yard, their waystation
There's something amazing about being a stopover on a journey of thousands of miles. The warbler flitting through your shrubs today may be in Central America next month; the White-throated Sparrow scratching in your leaf litter may spend the whole winter with you. Offer them rich food, standing seed heads, a soft blanket of leaves, clean water, dense cover, and darkened windows at night, and your ordinary backyard becomes an extraordinary gift — a safe place for rest, refuge, and refueling.