6 Bird Watching Backyard Bird Activities

If you are lucky enough to have a backyard have you ever thought about teaching the kids about the various birds that visit your property each day? Learning about the birds, about their own unique attributes and being able to differentiate between the various types is a great activity to enjoy. Have you ever thought about bird watching?

You may not know much about birds yourself? Can you tell a cockatoo from a corella, a rosella from a lorikeet?

6 Bird Watching Backyard Bird Activities

Table of Contents

Identify the birds that visit your backyard

If you have a backyard (or front yard) that has some trees or bushes and is free from pets like dogs and cats, you are likely to have a bird or two visit each day. Can you name all of the birds that visit your backyard? Bird watching will help you.

My kids love birds so we have been using the Birds of Western Sydney Photo Guide to identify and categorise the birds that visit our backyard. We’re not really in Western Sydney area, but have found that this resource has been perfect for recognising ALL of the birds that frequent our property.

Tally the birds that visit your garden

Once you know what birds visit your garden you can begin tallying which frequent your property the most by completing a simple tally system. Learning how to tally is a great life skill for kids and can be generalised to different activities such as counting cars, scoring games, each time an orator says “um” in a speech and so on.

Download the Kid Bucket List Bird Tally Sheet

Categorise the birds

Australian birds are a vast spectrum of uniqueness with many attributes differing them from each other. Feet, beaks, feathers, wings, these all help determine their groupings.

Categorising birds into their families can be quite a fun activity to do with the kids. Is it a parrot? Is it a bird of prey? There are plenty of resources abound on the internet to help you with this activity and may other lesson types for home. The Beaks Feet and Feathers resource is my favourite.

Download the Beaks Feet and Feathers education resource

Attract more birds to your backyard

Wouldn’t it be great if you could attract more birds to your backyard? Attracting native birds to your garden is an interesting project as you will need to work out what will actually reinforce their behaviour of returning.

There are four main things that should work as a starting point: Shelter, Water, Food, Safety.

Shelter

If you want to attract more birds to your property you may like to think about creating a suitable habitat that feels welcoming to your favoured bird species. Shelter could be a consideration especially if you are keen to invite nesting birds into your backyard.

In the wild, many Australian bird species use natural hollows in trees. However, these days trees that have hollows in them in a typical backyard are removed as they are viewed to be unsafe. This has greatly reduced suitable habitats on many suburbian properties. Opting to create a nesting box or two and placing it in good spots in your yard may increase the bird life, but you will need help.

The Environmental Officer of your Local Government Authority will be able to tell you which bird species needs your assistance. This will help determine the shape and size of the bird box. You’ll need to do this properly otherwise you may end up with invasive minors or even wasps taking over the nesting box.

Carefully selected native plants are probably the most effective way of attracting birds to your garden and providing suitable shelter. The Domestic Gardener information resource provides some great advice around this that should help you plan.

Download the domestic gardener information resource here.

Water

Have you ever watched birds in water? They absolutely adore it for both bathing and drinking. Interestingly, different birds have various ways they like to interact with water. Some, like parrots, will happily dance and shake around in the water. Some like to swim. Some like to sip the water from the edge. It is important to provide a range of different water sources if you wish to attract birds to your garden.

When it is hot, birds will flock to your garden if they know that you offer water.

Download the Providing Water for Birds information sheet

Food

For years I thought that birds loved bread. There have been times where I have grabbed a loaf of bread and headed to the local pond to feed the ducks. It wasn’t until recently that I learned that this is far from ideal for most birds and their tummies. So what does one feed birds?

Australian native birds like to eat a range of different food like nectar, seeds and/or berries, as well as insects. I acknowledge that feeding wild birds in your garden is quite a controversial topic. I’ve learned that bread, mince and even honey/water mixes can be problematic and can lead to malnutrition if this is all your bird visitors are eating. I wouldn’t put this food stuff out for your birds. Unhygienic practices can also lead to disease or the spread of disease in your little bird population, so you need to get this right.

For starters, don’t buy your bird food from the supermarket. The experts reveal that this does not have the nutritional requirements native birds need inside. Instead, look for commercial nectar mixes or seed mixes from a good produce store. For meat eating birds you might light to try dry dog food or dog roll as these are the best alternatives currently available (thank you for this tip Bird in Backyards). It is suggested that these can be supplemented with an insectivore mix (like Wombaroo), also available at good produce stores.

If your bird stations start encouraging flocks to form, you need to stop. Any flock over 20 birds or more can actually lead to the spread of disease. You need to avoid this. For the same reason, clean your station after each feed to prevent mynas eating the leftovers. Make sure that this is a sometime thing rather than an everyday type of thing.

For us, we’re trying to create a garden abundant in native grasses, bushes and trees that flower and produce gumnuts etc that will attract birds. Already we have native honeyeaters and lorikeets visiting us every single day without any need to provide purchased food.

Safety

This should go without saying, if you have a cat or dog, then your backyard is not a very safe space. Birds are unlikely to populate an area where they are going to come across your pet. Think about the space you want the animals to come and reduce access to your pets.

Create a Native Garden Space

The best way to attract birds to your garden is by creating a Native Garden space. We have spent a lot of time as a family working out what brings all the birds to our yard! Gardening Australia have this nifty resource that identifies a range of Australian native plants that will work in your garden.

For us, we found grevillea, bottlebrush and banksias to draw the most birds to our yard. By watering regularly, and providing a good native fertiliser, magpies seemed to be attracted to our space as well, perhaps for the worms of other small invertebrates.

Learn to Recognise Bird Song

Bird song, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful sounds (except for penguin song – that’s pretty awful). Dawn or dusk can sound like a symphony of delight depending on the time of year, but can you identify the different birds that are singing?

The Top 40 Birds Songs provides the sound of forty different birds. Learning each of them and then trying to recognise them in the backyard can be a lot of fun. With a little creativity you could use the sounds to play bingo, Hear Hear (like eye spy but with sounds) and a range of other games.