What’s for dinner? Pokeweed berries! During our summer vacation, I watched catbirds make meals out of every ripening pokeberry they could find near our motel in Dewey Beach, Delaware. Leave these beautiful native plants in your yard, and you’ll provide a significant food source for resident and migratory birds come fall.
“Smaller birds —passerines — only fly at night, and so every morning they must find somewhere to set down, be it to rest or to really rapidly replenish their fat stores, and they want to do this in a matter of days,” Susan Smith Pagano of the Rochester Institute of Technology told me when I interviewed her for my book, The Humane Gardener.
Plants introduced from elsewhere aren’t as likely to deliver nutritional content that hungry birds need on long journeys south, according to research by Pagano and others. Nonnative plants also don’t attract as many of the invertebrates that birds rely on, depriving them of another important food source.
The research identified a diverse mix of preferred native plants for Eastern migratory songbird habitat. If planted in gardens across communities, just imagine how much we could collectively help wildlife. The plants include native viburnums, Virginia creeper, native dogwood shrubs, serviceberries, elderberries, spicebush, chokeberries, chokecherries, blueberries, bayberries, winterberries, and yes—pokeweed.
Another study found that catbirds using fall stopovers dominated by nonnative shrubs had lower body mass and poorer immune status than those who stopped in habitats filled with natives. Help a catbird out and avoid the mistakes I made when I first started gardening and pulled pokeweed out of our habitat. Though invasive in some states, pokeweed is native to much of the country. Wherever you live, you can learn more about the plants volunteering in your garden before deciding they’re not worthy. If you are patient and observant, I guarantee you’ll find some treasures for wildlife!
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(Video by Nancy Lawson)