Tales from the Garden

When I first started learning to identify birds, I heard a lot about “LBJs” from veteran birders, but they didn’t mean former President Lyndon B. Johnson!   For birders, LBJs means “little brown jobs” and is the nickname for the many birds in the sparrow family so similar that it can be very difficult to tell apart even when you have time to get a good look at them.     The very first time I visited Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge in 1993, I was pretty overwhelmed by the number of LBJs I saw along the Cienega and Arivaca Creek trails, and in the areas around the refuge headquarters.   I wondered how I could possibly ever learn to be able to identify them, and in all the years afterward, I have met a whole lot of birders who feel similarly challenged despite being much more experienced than I.      It wasn’t too hard for me to learn the most common species in Western Washington urban and suburban habitats, because many have a distinct identifying feature such as the stripes on the

Over the past few years, I’ve been told by many of my fellow Arivacans that they would love to attract more birds into their yards, and been asked what I think is the best way to do that.    My answer is always the same: “Provide clean, fresh water” .   Although birds and other wildlife all have 4 basic needs  - food, shelter, nesting places, and water - many birds can find the first 3 of these things in the areas around Arivaca where there are plentiful native trees, shrubs, and grasses.   However, fresh water is something that is not plentiful during much of the year around here.   In addition, the places where water IS available may not be able to be accessed safely by birds, such as livestock water tanks (which are too deep) and/or where there is also a lot of human activity such as Arivaca Lake, which can make them reluctant to visit the shoreline.    Even in the Pacific Northwest with its many lakes and rivers, the wet winters give way to hot, dry summers with very few shallow