Price : $8.79

Product Description

Create your own private nature preserve-with dozens of ingenious ideas to turn a typical backyard into a beautiful natural habitat for birds and other wildlife.

Experience the gratification of watching birds gobble seeds and other treats from your homemade bird feeder. Look on with delight as a mother bird tends to her babies in the protective hideaway of a birdhouse you have lovingly constructed from a dried gourd. Create a sunflower plantation, a bird teepee, a tent-style twig feeder, a pedestal birdbath. Follow the step-by-step instructions in this book, and your yard will quickly become an enticing playground, breeding ground, and feeding ground for colorful songbirds. And that’s not all-there are also projects specially designed to attract beautiful hummingbirds and butterflies to your garden.

Among the book’s special features:
- Projects require only a few simple tools and supplies and most can be easily and inexpensively assembled using only scrap materials found around the house

- Information-packed sidebars include tips for identifying the nests and eggs of songbirds and unusual facts and figures about birds and bird behavior

- Instructions show how to create baffles and barriers to keep squirrels, raccoons, and other unwanted guess away from the birdseed-along with projects for tending to these feeder-raiding marauders too!

The simple pleasure of viewing birds in your backyard is something to treasure every day of the year. Whether you are a seasoned bird watcher or are new to the hobby, you will find a wealth of inspirational ideas here to attract more birds than ever before to your backyard. And you’ll increase your enjoyment of this soul-satisfying pastime.

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-07-18
Some great ideas…quite practical uses for otherwise discarded items and the birds really do respond! Highly recommend for group scouting project ideas because they generally don’t require specialized tools or unusual materials. I recycled several items that were otherwised destined to be thrown away. Thanks! Enjoy!

Review date : 2008-02-24
I own a good dozen or more books on how to attract birds to my garden. This book is definitely one of my favorites.

It contains a variety of very easy projects on best ways of providing seeds, making your own bird treats (like those expensive seed bells they sell in stores), creating feeding stations, planting habitats, setting up water stations, birdhouses and more. There is also a section devoted to hummingbirds and butterflies.

I really like that it isn’t a bird or plant identification book. One of my pet peeves with many of my other "project" books is that they dilute their content by including bird identification charts for instance - often up to 1/3 of the book with another third devoted to pictures and descriptions of the plants. I’d rather leave that to a specialized book and let my project books be filled with (imagine this) projects! There is a small amount of this type of information in this book, but it’s generally to the point and captured in simple and easy to read charts. I would suggest anyone looking for that type of material should buy appropriate field guides.

I love that the projects are pretty much entirely able to be made from recycled materials (like using the plastic tubes that tennis balls come in or metal coffee cans or plastic plant saucers for instance) and scrap wood. They are very easy and could be wonderful projects for engaging your kids with nature and getting fast results. Tips are also included for maintenance too (such as keeping feeding stations looking their best).

I also love the garden ideas - simple plans for small patches of specialized garden areas - there’s one for a self-renewing bird attracting garden with a ton of seed-producing annual flowering plants for instance; a garden for producing nesting materials, another for attracting butterflies by providing food for their caterpillars, one for hummingbirds and a number of others.

Overall, if you are trying to attract birds to your yard and especially if you are looking for ideas for projects you can do with your kids to give them an appreciation for nature, I think you can’t go wrong with this book.

Review date : 2007-12-27
This book will delight the Do-It-Yourself types who would rather put something together and attract birds to their backyards than to merely observe them in the wild. It’s a sturdy, glossy trade paperback with detailed line-drawings, tables, side-bars, and step-by-step project sheets.

It starts with a section of fast-and-easy projects for beginners to get your feet wet with the easiest of the various types of woodworking, cooking, and gardening projects you can do to attract birds.

Later chapters go into detail on each of the specialties (woodworking, cooking, gardening) so that you can either do it all or just focus on the chapters that address your talents.

The book also includes a Projects-at-a-Glance index so you can look up things to do involving Nesting, Water, Landscaping, et cetera. Highly recommended. Longer review at OrnateBirdGarden-dot-com.

Review date : 2007-02-21
This is a great book for anyone interested in backyard birding, no matter what size your backyard may be. There are articles on how to attract, feed, and house different birds.

Review date : 2007-02-16
I like this book. I’m a new bird watcher. I’ve made some of the projects mentioned in this book and they work quite well.