HELP
YOUR
NEIGHBORS
SMALL BIRDS
What do birds like to eat?
Feeding small birds during the colder time of the year is both exciting and fascinating. Close up we can study their behavior, appearance, and the differences between sexes; how to separate old birds from young; and many other similarities and differences between the different species.
During a cold winter, a well-stocked bird table can make the difference between life and death for many small birds. So what should you be serving? Depending on the environment and in what part of the country you are, there are different bird species outside your window. Some are generalists and eat practically anything, while others are more specialized and only eat a certain type of food.
Generally the trick is to feed the birds with as much carbohydrates and fat as possible. The birds usually have a good sense of what is appropriate for them. If you feel unsure, you can start by offering a few different types of seeds. You quickly learn what type they eat the most.
SEEDS ARE THE MAIN DIET
If you live near a garden, park, or forest the sunfower seed is a perfect option. In city environment or near farmland a mixture of different seeds tends to be better than only sunflower seeds. It is always good to complement the seed diet with other food. A wider variety of food where the birds can choose between different things attracts different bird species. Besides seeds you can offer suet balls, bags of nuts, raisins, cubes of cheese, apples, cookies, and sweet bread. In short, there are plenty of things to offer!
Some bird species only eat on the ground, while others like to eat from different types of bird feeders, or peck at suet balls and bags of nuts. Choose different spots to place the food. Tat lowers the risk of infection, and it is more similar to natural conditions. If you place the bird food in open spaces you are likely to have less visits from birds. It is better to serve it close to a bush, where the birds will feel safer if a sparrow hawk or another predatory bird were to show up, hoping for a feast.
HAVE TO DRINK AS WELL
Birds need to drink water to replace what is lost through feces and exhaled air, and to some extent through the skin. Birds lack sweat glands so no water is lost through sweat. Snow is frozen water and during the winter the birds to a certain extent obtain fluids through the snow, if there is no access to open water.
Small birds drink by dipping their beak in the water so that the cavities in their mouth are filled by capillary force and surface tension. They can fill their beaks very quickly, but it takes from three to five times as long for the water to flow down the throat through the lifted beak.
SATURDAY SWEETS!
A favorite among many birds is oats. The grains are even more desirable if you drench them in canola oil or some other vegetable oil and let the mixture stand overnight.
THINK ABOUT THE FOLLOWING
To avoid infections it is important to keep good hygiene at the bird table:
› Use bird tables that the birds cannot walk around on to avoid contaminating the food with feces.
› Regularly rake or sweep up leftover food and other waste under the bird table.
› Wash your hands when you have placed food on, or cleaned, the bird table.
› Bird food can attract uninvited guests like voles, mice, and other rodents, which is important to consider—especially in a city environment. If you live in a townhouse you should ask the owner if it is even allowed at all to feed birds.
. . . bird houses can be placed south, southwest, or west? If the house is big enough there should not be any problems with overheating.
. . . the nuthatch likes to live in bird houses but does not settle for just any type of entrance? It has a habit of walling the entrance with dirt, mud, and its own saliva so that the hole exactly fits its body shape. It also walls other cracks and gaps in the house so that no light can get in.
SPEAKING OF
It used to be important to note from what direction you heard the cuckoo sing for the first time in spring. The best would be to hear it sing from the west: If you heard it from the east it meant ease in the coming season, and from the north meant grief. It was the worst to hear it from the south because it foretold that the person hearing it would soon die.
How can you stop birds from flying into windows?
Sometimes you may find small birds that are unconscious or in worst cases dead on the ground under one of your windows. It is especially common if the windows are placed so that you can see right through the house.
Sometimes the bird breaks its neck when it hits the window, but usually it manages to survive. Often it just flies on, although sometimes the bird can become temporarily knocked out and fall down on the ground. It is then in great danger of being caught by a predatory bird. If you find a lifeless bird under the window you should pick it up and put it in, for example, a shoebox with a cover and keep in a protected place inside. After an hour or so, peek inside and see if the bird has come around. Ten you can set it free again, outside.
When birds can see a tree or the sky on the other side of a window they think that the coast is clear, and do not notice the window. Therefore you should try to stop them from seeing straight through the house. Drawn curtains can be enough. Another method is to place silhouettes of predatory birds on the windows. The silhouettes are frightening, especially if they resemble a bigger bird gliding in a high altitude ready to attack. Birds never fly towards a predatory bird, only away from it.
FUSS ON THE BIRD TABLE
It also happens that predatory birds are the direct cause of small birds flying into the window. In the wintertime it is not unusual for hungry sparrowhawks to visit the bird tables. Sparrowhawks have a sneaky way of hunting that lets them suddenly show up in the midst of all the eating birds. When the small birds discover the predatory bird they fly in panic in all directions, and it frequently happens that some of them fly in the direction of a window. It also happens that the hunting predatory bird is so focused on its chase that it flies straight into a window. Predatory birds can then break their necks as well, temporarily pass out, or just fly on as if nothing happened—and then probably without any catch.
BUTTERFLIES
Can you attract butterflies to your garden?
A garden can be made butterfly friendly fairly easily if you plant colorful plants rich in nectar. With the help of these you will get many visits from our most beautiful butterflies. A shallow bird bath attracts both butterflies and birds that can sit and drink on the edge.
The number of butterflies is decreasing, and one of the main reasons is that fields and meadows are overgrown, causing many of the plants that are important to butterflies to disappear. The missing plants were either hosts for larvae or nectar plants for the grown butterflies. By supplementing existing flower beds and bushes with appropriate nectar plants and hosts for larvae, you can help the butterflies. Few but large populations usually have greater attraction ability than many and small populations do.
Especially suitable butterfly plants are Coltsfoot and dandelion in the spring, and other plants from the sunflower family during the rest of the year, like oxeye daisies and different types of asters. Herbs are often perfect for butterflies—and for many wild bees—but they are also not attractive for Roe deer! Flowering bushes like honeysuckle, lilac, and spiraea give nutrition to butterflies as well as moths. But few plants can compete with the buddleja in being a butterfly magnet. Therefore it is also known as butterfly bush. It blooms June–August and sometimes in September, and there are several named species with different heights, from about 3.2 feet to 9.8 feet high.
BUTTERFLIES HAVE STICKS
Butterflies are categorized into butterflies and moths. There is no easy and certain way of separating the two groups by looks. A good way however would be to look at the antennae; a butterfly almost always has a thicker part at the end, like a little stick, while moths' antennae often are thin without a stick. Some male moths have featherlike antennae, to sense the female's smell from far away. Another difference is that the butterflies often have colorful patterns and are active during daytime, while moths are mostly camouflaged and active during nighttime. This rule does however have many exceptions. For the most part it is relatively easy to spot butterflies by using good guidebooks.
TIPS FOR GOLF COURSES
With simple measures our golf courses could contribute a great deal to biodiversity without any greater costs. The golf course in itself, the fairway, is indeed inevitably a grassy dessert. But meadows could easily be created around it, the ruff, with lots of wild flowers. By planting suitable host plants for the butterfly larvae and making sure there is an abundance of plants with nectar for the butterflies during the whole season, you would do butterflies as well as humans a great favor.
. . . the world's biggest butterfly is the Hercules moth Coscinocera hercules? It has a wingspan of about 100 square inches—almost as big as a sheet of paper. The Hercules moth exists in tropical Australia and New Guinea.
. . . Sweden's largest butterfly is the Apollo, whose big females' wingspan can measure up to 4 inches? Also big females of the Poplar Admiral and the Old World Swallowtail have in a few cases reached a wingspan length of almost 4 inches.
. . . Sweden's smallest butterfly is called Polyommatini? It has a wingspan of only 0.7-0.9 inches.
. . . 2,821 butterfly species have been observed in Sweden, but only 120 are butterflies?
. . . 504 of our butterfly species can be found on the IUCN red list of endangered species (as of 2010)? Out of these, 25 species are critically endangered and 73 are endangered.
. . . Taumetopoeidaes are the only very “dangerous” butterfly larvae that can cause big problems to sensitive people?
HOST PLANTS THAT FEED BUTTERFLY LARVAE
| › Cabbage, rapeseed | Cabbage butterfly, Small Cabbage White, and Green-veined white |
| › Tistles | Painted Lady |
| › Wild strawberries | Grizzled Skipper |
| › Ribes | Comma |
| › Blackberries | Green Hairstreak |
| › Sorrels | Small copper |
| › Clover | Mazarine Blue |
| › Stinging nettle | Red Admiral |
| › Tufted vetch | Polyommatini |
| › Viola | Heliconians |
What does a butterfly larva eat?
The life cycle of a butterfly is fascinating: a crawling, live larva hatches from the egg, to then change into a fairly immobilized cocoon before the full-grown butterfly fnally spreads its wings. With a little care and patience it is possible to observe the exciting transformations close up.
If you want to take a butterfly larva home, you should memorize what plant it was sitting on when you found it. It is a good idea to bring home a leaf or the whole plant, since it probably is the food that the larva likes the most. If you are unsure of what the larva eats you can give it a few different sorts of leaves or plants, picked around the area where you found the larva.
If the larva is not full-grown you can feed it with its host plant in a plastic bag or a glass jar with holes in the lid. When it starts looking a bit dull and stops eating, that usually means it is about to pupate. If it is a butterfly the larva usually pupate above the ground, often sitting on a stick or a straw. Moth larvae pupating dig themselves completely underground; if it's a moth larva, you can fill a jar with mixed soil about 2 inches deep and place the larva there. Ten leave it alone for around two weeks.
Whether the larva is a butterfly or a moth, you can place them to hibernate in the refrigerator or outside in a frost free place.
WATCH OUT FOR HAIRY CREATURES!
While we are still at the theme of larvae, a word of caution: Beware of long-haired creatures; you should just let them stay in nature. Many of these larvae have nettle cells in the hairs that will burn our skin when they touch us. The hairs can unfortunately cause allergies or strong itchiness. Because of the hairs most birds avoid eating these larvae. The cuckoo is an exception that somehow manages to eat the hairy larvae.
PUPA TURNS INTO BUTTERFLY
Many butterflies rest over the winter as pupae and normally spend it at a frost free depth in the ground, in some cavity or other protected spot. You could make a hibernating place friendly for your butterfly pupae outdoors, for example on a balcony or the porch. Place a layer of moss and leaves in the bottom of a small glass, plastic jar, or a box, and place the butterfly pupa on top. Ten place a layer of moss and leaves on top and preferably also around the jar. It is important that the pupa is protected from sunlight.
Boxes that contain pupae cannot be subjected to frost or too much cold. You can put the jar in a wooden box with a lid that has fairly big drilled holes in the bottom. The wooden box should stand on a couple of wood pieces so that it is a little elevated from the ground, and protected from snow and rain.
You can take the jar inside to room temperature in January at the earliest. If you know what butterfly species it is you can take the jar inside a couple of weeks before its counterparts in nature are ready to fly of. It is important that the pupae are not subjected to a rapid temperature change; a vestibule or a basement can therefore be a suitable stop in between. After that the pupae should be kept as humid as possible but not enough to mold. When the butterflies hatch after a couple of weeks, it is important that they can climb up on a stick, a piece of fabric, or something similar so that the blood quickly reaches the wing ribs; that makes the wings dry as straight as possible. Good luck!
MORE NATURE IN THE GARDEN
Take good care of your garden so that it becomes as varied as possible. A mosaic of flowering herbs, uncut and cut areas of grass, and a few bushes here and there will attract not only beautiful butterflies; birds like it and perhaps a hedgehog will visit you. To watch a hedgehog root around in the dusk is a great adventure! The hedgehog's natural diet consists of snails, worms, insects, and larvae. Amphibians and reptiles are also included in their diet, as well as dead animals. Sometimes it eats vegetables and fallen fruit, although that is more rare.
If you want to create nice food for hedgehogs you can use regular dry dog and cat food. Soak until it turns soft. The hedgehog should not drink milk, as it will get a stomach ache, therefore only give it water.
. . . the hedgehog makes many different sounds? It coughs, sputters, sniffles, and snorts. If scared or in pain it gives of a shrill cry.
. . . a hedgehog has thousands of quills? One of the conservators at the Swedish Museum of Natural History counted the quills on an adult hedgehog and reached the number of 6,000 unbendable, hard quills. Additionally it had about 1,500 bendable, soft quills.
BUMBLEBEES AND BEES
Can you build nests for bumblebees?
Bumblebees are very useful in nature because they pollinate our flowers. Most bumblebee species live underground, usually in abandoned vole or mice passages. You can however build artificial nests for bumblebees above ground.
A nest should have two rooms—one antechamber and a second chamber. The antechamber has an entrance hole that you can close, as well as a device for feeding with sugar solution. You should also be able to place pollen-giving flowers in the antechamber. From the antechamber to the second chamber there should be a passage outfitted with suitable nesting material, for example withered grass or moss.
The whole nest can benefit from being surrounded by extra walls to protect it from light and temperature changes.
Strong heat from the sun, as well as night frost and other strong cold, should be prevented.
NOT HARMFUL
Wild bees that live above ground often build in cavities in trees but usually any type of hole is fine, as long as it is deep enough. A crack in the house wall, an old tube lying around or even a keyhole can be good enough! Bees that nest like this are absolutely not pests. They are only using a cavity that already existed.
UNDERGROUND FRIENDS
About half of our wild bees build nests in existing cavities above ground. The rest dig their own nests in the ground. You can expect a visit from nest-building bees in dirt piles, under the porch, or in another spot that is easy to dig in your garden. The bees are completely harmless unless you provoke them. The best thing to do is to let them keep on with their nesting. If you need to transport, for example, dirt piles away from your garden and wild bees are already nesting there, it is best if you can wait until next spring when the new bees have hatched and flown out. If they are removed before that the larvae and pupae will probably die.
The female lays her fertilized eggs one at a time, usually in a row, and separates them with a thin coat so that a little room, called a cell, is created for each egg. In each egg cell she puts food for the soon to be larvae in the shape of pollen or paralyzed prey, all depending on species. When all of the cavitities are filled, she walls the hole with mud or wax.
When the eggs begin to hatch, the larvae start eating the food and when it is finished they pupate and rest in the cavity over the winter. In the spring the pupae are hatched and the full-grown bees chew their way through the hole and fly out. The bees closest to the exit are hatched first and, therefore, no one gets stuck in the hole. The males are closest to the exist and are thus hatched first, while the females are in the back of the pipe or cavity and hatch last.
. . . a bumblebee can carry a load of pollen that weighs over 0.001 oz on their rear legs and a honey bee can carry 0.0004 oz? Tat is an equivalent of six and sixteen percent of their own weight!
WHAT TO DO IF YOU. . .
. . . find a butterfly larva in the autumn?
One advice is to let the larva dig down in a jar filled with 4-6 inches of loose soil mixed with sand, and on the very top place a layer of leaves. Tat way it has the greatest chances of survival.
. . . find a stag beetle?
The stag beetle belongs in areas with oak trees and is still fairly spread out in the southeastern parts of the country. Especially in dawn you could, with a little bit of luck, catch a glimpse of the giant beetles flying. The larva needs 4-5 years to develop and lives in decayed wood. Oak stumps are the most common places, but other stumps of leafy trees or piles of sawdust are good enough. If you find a lost stag beetle you can let it out in dawn and hope that it finds its way back for the next day. The very best thing is to transport it to an area with oak trees.
WINGED INSECTS—NO HEAVY WEIGHTS
An employee of the Swedish Museum of Natural History collected and weighed a few different insects. The insects were full-grown, adult individuals. Here are their weights:
| Wart-biter | 0.06 oz |
| Humblebee | 0.018 oz |
| Cabbage Butterfly, male | 0.007 oz |
| Honey Bee | 0.0028 oz |
| Wasp, a worker | 0.0021 oz |
| Seven-spotted ladybug | 0.0012 oz |
| Earwig | 0.0010 oz |
| Horse ant | 0.0004 oz |
| Mosquito | 0.0001 oz |
. . . the stag beetle is one of Sweden's heaviest insects? The size of the stag beetle varies a great deal; the largest males can get up to 3 inches long and weigh between 0.14-0.28 oz, but some individuals can be as small as 1 inch. The females also vary in size and can get up to 1.1-1.7 inches long. The stag beetle is the landscape insect of Blekinge.