Create Bird Sanctuaries Everywhere: Help Our Feathered Friends Thrive!

Daniel Gérard, a landscaping teacher at Eplefpa Naturapolis (Indre), actively participates in the Arbusticulteurs association and works as a field ornithologist and birdwatching guide in the Brenne regional nature park. Creating a Beautiful Bird Sanctuary in Your Garden is his first published book.

Decatur Metro — In your book’s preface, one figure stands out: private gardens in France cover 2% of the country’s total surface area, which is four times the area of natural reserves. Is turning one’s garden into a bird refuge significant?

Daniel Gérard — Indeed, it’s substantial. Each green space, no matter how small, plays a much larger role than one might think for birds, increasingly fleeing urban areas with their pollution, heatwaves, and food shortages, for the countryside and its gardens.

Thus, it’s our responsibility to realize the role we can play in aiding the survival of “ordinary biodiversity,” from adopting simple measures to redesigning entire green spaces and gardens.

I recently saw a goldfinch with both feet so damaged and deformed it struggled to stand. This is a typical disability from diseases spread by unclean feeders or water stations. This is just one example—others include nighttime light pollution and the absence of predator-protected “bathing spots”—but it illustrates the point: if only some amateur gardeners revised part of their habits, it would already be a significant effort for the birds.

What sparked your interest in reevaluating your gardening practices to welcome more birds into your garden?

I’ve always been enchanted by birds—their freedom, the subtlety of their songs, their remarkable adaptability—and I’ve observed them since childhood, eventually studying ornithology and becoming a guide and instructor at the Brenne regional nature park.

Realizing they were threatened by human impacts on their habitats (30% have disappeared in thirty years in Europe, that’s 420 million!), I decided to rethink my gardening practices to help reverse the decline of their populations at my own level.

Which practices should be reconsidered?

Harmful practices rooted in a culture of dominating nature: from using Bordeaux mixture against mildew to hedge trimming with hedge trimmers. In both cases, we opt for a supposedly quick and effective solution, but which, for the former, reduces soil richness by killing fungi; for the latter, limits the abundance of flowers, fruits, and berries birds enjoy.

Pruning with secateurs, considered more plant-friendly and ecological, would reduce green waste, use of hydrocarbons, and even gardener fatigue.

We should also reconsider our aesthetic ideals stemming from classicism, with its pursuit of regularity and uniformity, and its war on wild grasses, etc., to accommodate the fundamental needs of birds (and other life), which are varied.

Consider nesting: the common chiffchaff, for instance, sings in the canopy but nests close to the ground, while the bullfinch or the spotted flycatcher needs denser shrub vegetation. This diversity should be considered for all their physiological needs: nesting, feeding, drinking, bathing, finding tranquility, darkness at night…

A biodiverse garden will thus be a garden with a lot of “diversity”: diversity in heights, densities, flowering and fruiting periods of plants, trees, hedges, etc.

This includes flora, even spontaneous, and fauna, from tiny springtails in the litter to small insectivores like the European hedgehog. To encourage birds to settle in your garden, you must view it as a dynamic whole: wildlife passages at the bottom of fences and patches of unmown grass are highly recommended.

To develop your garden in this spirit, you’ll also need to move away slightly from the “clean and low-maintenance” desire often heard in garden centers.

Isn’t it legitimate to want low maintenance when time is limited?

Yes, but it can blind us. In my youth, I dug with my father, a gardener, around shrubbery beds: the idea was to create a “clean,” well-dug base. This culture of the “clean soil” hasn’t disappeared: it’s just been replaced by the trend of organic ground covers (pine bark, wood chips) and mineral mulches (like slate chips), purportedly also “low-maintenance.”

But it’s an illusion. Nature abhors a vacuum and will eventually colonize the empty spaces between slate chips with potentially undesirable species like birch (allergenic) or butterfly bush (invasive). To avoid weeding, it would suffice to surround trees and beds with ground-covering plants, herbaceous (deadnettle, summer snowflake) or shrubby (honeysuckle, large-flowered St. John’s wort).

These would also enhance water infiltration and shelter fauna appreciated by ground-nesting birds. And the ground would still be “clean and low-maintenance,” just more alive.

Planting diverse hedges, “cultivar” shrubs, herbaceous climbing plants, de-asphalting grounds… Where to start?

The first step is diagnostics: where am I with my garden? Do I find its ecological value satisfactory? If not, what can I change? To renature it, what can replace that concrete slab, for example, to allow water through?

The branches I used to remove, why not accumulate them in a corner to welcome wrens? And what if I added some melliferous plants, for the delight of bees and European bee-eaters, who love them so much?

The best approach is to work gently by sector. Define modification zones and move towards their “differentiated management”: near the terrace, I might intervene more to clear the view, but a bit further, why not allow the grass to grow taller, which will attract the linnet and the song thrush?

To create an ecological garden, must one set aside personal aesthetic tastes?

Not at all. You can consider plant choices based on both aesthetic and ecological objectives. This is a notion I advocate. The 115 plants listed in my book combine beauty and fragrance with characteristics sought by birds (rich in fruits, berries, insects) and are not too demanding in terms of water.

It’s also important not to make casting mistakes. There’s nothing worse than thinking: “I like it, I’ll buy it; and if it grows too much, I’ll trim it!” and then battling the plant because it exceeds the desired height. There’s such a rich variety of plants available that you’ll definitely find one that pleases you and meets your maintenance and size expectations. Take time to read and ask nurserymen, and you’ll save time later.

What would you say to someone hesitant to get started?

Go for it! April-May, with all the plant and biological life starting up again, is the ideal season to begin assessing your green space. Become a committed ecocitizen without fear: experiment, nothing is irreversible in the garden!

Also, give yourself time to witness the slow but sure improvement of your green space. What joy to feel your perceptions of the surrounding living world sharpen, and to feel more connected to it! And never mind if your neighbor is temporarily upset by your patch of lawn transformed into a flowering meadow… The chirping of birds will soon make you forget it.