Talking Trees with Davey Tree

How Do Trees Help Birds & Animals?

February 25, 2021 The Davey Tree Expert Company Season 1 Episode 7
Talking Trees with Davey Tree
How Do Trees Help Birds & Animals?
Show Notes Transcript

Dana Karcher, area manager and project developer for Davey Resource Group, Inc., talks about how trees help wildlife, the best trees for them and how you can help.

In this episode we cover:

  • Why are trees good for wildlife? (0:52)
  • Best trees for wildlife (1:47)
    • Oak trees (3:06)
    • Walnut trees (3:39)
  • Squirrels and racoons (4:26)
  • Birds (5:34) (10:28)
  • Insects (7:37)
  • Dana's job at Davey Resource Group, Inc. (8:40) (14:37)
  • Pollinators (13:55)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more about the best trees for birds, read our blog, Best Trees and Plants for Bird Lovers.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company

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Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree expert company's podcast Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each episode showcases one of Davey's certified arborists, sharing advice with everyone about caring for your trees and landscapes. We'll talk about everything from introduced pests, seasonal tree care, deer damage, how to make your trees thrive, and much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. We are joined this week by Dana Karcher, she's an area Manager and Project Developer for the Davey Resource Group.

We know trees are great for shade and beauty, but one of my favorite topics is they're great for wildlife too, right?

Dana Karcher: Absolutely. It's one of those things we learn in school on arbor day.

Doug: What's the first thing we should talk about when it comes to wildlife. I'm a birder. I love having evergreens around the bird feeder as a place for those to stage, but what are some other things you're thinking about as far as why trees are so good for wildlife?

Dana: Well, I always look out my window at my home office here and I have a big red oak tree in front of my window. I always see my good friends, the squirrels who are not good friends to most people, but they do provide some entertainment for us. We think about squirrels and raccoons and some of those types of animals. In the wild, there's all kinds of animals that benefit from trees, what they bring to us, food and water shelter and all of that. I lean towards the birds as well. I think that birds are critical in the landscape and trees of course are their best home.

Doug: Yes. If I'm thinking about what tree is best to be a source for either food or shelter for wildlife, what are some of the varieties you're thinking about?

Dana: Well, I think big trees of course provide the most benefits all the way around and big trees provide a lot for birds as well and for other animals too, but they provide food because of-- They leak sap. Their buds are important, their nuts and then, of course, fruit, which comes in the form of berries or actual fruit. There's always insects in the bark and in the leaves as well. Size is important. Big trees of course provide more food, but small trees also have little berries and places for animals to hide. Think about small birds, small trees. That's one of the things that I always think about when I look like a dog would or something like that. Space is important. It just depends on where you live.

Doug: Well, I would just assume that a variety of different trees. Blooming shrubs and trees with berries and things that make nuts. I've always been told that different types of oaks are a great resource for wildlife.

Dana: Well, one of the things about oaks is they live a long time. They provide that shelter in a couple of different ways. They provide those nesting sites that both squirrels and birds and raccoons can live in. Those are the cavities that are in the trees that sometimes make a tree unsafe, but also do provide those homes for animals. They're important. I grew up in California and we had walnut trees on our property and we had many animal homes in those walnut trees as they began to age. They provided obviously nuts and they have big leaves, really big leaves, but they also provided those cavities too. You have to be careful because you have to have a professional look at those trees if you've got cavities in them.

Doug: Oh, definitely. I often say on this podcast that the team from Davies spends a couple of times a year, here on my property and that's what happened. I had a big Oak way out in the woods and it fell and you could-- They told me right off the bat, they looked at that cavity and said, "This looks like this was a raccoon hotel here."

[laughter]

Doug: You said something interesting about squirrels in general, but squirrels raccoons, and other animals, they're part of our ecosystem. That's just the way it is. You don't want to stop a squirrel or a raccoon from living up in a tree. It's just part of our natural landscape.

Dana: That's right. I always think about the squirrels actually as the acorn spreaders. When I first moved to my house that I live in central Texas. I said I had this huge, beautiful red Oak in my front yard. We don't mow our lawn. We let our leaves fall on it and create that great mulch for our lawn during the wintertime. About this time spring of last year, we had a huge acorn crop and my neighbor laughed at the fact that I was mowing down an entire [unintelligible 00:05:22] Those are spread by squirrels. They bury them and they move those acorns around all over the place. I probably could have opened a nursery up with how many, little seedlings I had going.

[laughter]

Doug: Let's talk a little bit about the birds. As I said, I just love feeding and watching the birds. A big part of the landscape and for gardening too. When I set up these foraging routes so to speak for the birds, they're coming to the bird feeder, they stick around, but they're going to eat a lot of caterpillars and other things out of the garden and certainly be feeding around the trees. Is there anything else we can do as far as what we should be planting to give a good habitat for the birds?

Dana: Well, you should provide a variety of trees. There's different nesting materials that can come out of different kinds of trees. Deciduous trees, of course, they lose their leaves in the winter, but they're filled with flowers and buds. In the springtime, that provides food and insects and food for the birds that way, but the leaf litter is also great on the ground to find those grubs and those worms that grow under that. I was talking about that in my own lawn.

Some of the best deciduous trees for birds include larches and mesquites, maples, your favorite oaks, my favorite as well, and maybe some willows. Coniferous trees are important too because they have those-- They have needles and they're green year-round, and they provide really good winter shelter for birds. Right now I'm looking out my window in Texas and it's snowy. I know you're shocked, but it's snowing. This is a good place. I've got a nice tree in my backyard for them to shelter in during this little bit of snow.

Doug: Oh, hold on. Snowing in Texas. Okay. I'm up in Pittsburgh. Yes. We're buried in snow, but snow in Texas?

Dana: Yes. I'm watching it fall outside my window right now. This would be the second snowstorm of the year for us. This is not a storm, maybe for Texas, it is. A couple of weeks ago we had four inches, and right now it's just coming down in little flakes.

Doug: You mentioned insects. There's a lot of data out there, about how great trees are as a habitat for many insects. Again, this is part of our ecosystem. Even if it's a bald-faced Hornet nest, way up in the top of an oak tree, that's just part of the ecosystem.

Dana: It really is. We battle some of them like [unintelligible 00:08:07], of course, which has really hit the Northeast is now-- It's in Colorado and of course in the center of the country and it's in Texas as well. We think about that. Not all the insects are good, but they do provide food for many of our bird friends and also for the other people we've talked about, the other things we've talked about, squirrels, raccoons, et cetera, too. They are part of our natural ecosystem. Yes.

Doug: Well, you're referring to the squirrels as people. It sounds like we both have a little Disney movie outside of our front windows here going on today. I interview a lot of arborists, but tell me a little bit about your job with the Davey Resource Group.

Dana: With Davey Resource Group, I really have the opportunity to work with all entities, municipalities, contractors, developers, to really help them manage their tree resource. We always say that Davey Resource Group doesn't own chainsaws and our counterparts across the country do that really good work for us, but we bring the pocket protector to the company we are. Many times they call us the nerds of the company, but we are the ones that get to look at tree and with our friends from the Davey Institute, look for tree diseases and things like that. We do inventories. We actually, count trees in cities.

We use a lot of GIS. We do a lot of work in canopies. Canopy is very important for cities, as you know. Good canopy brings good health which also animals to cities. We do a lot of work around those areas.

Doug: How did you get into working with trees?

Dana: I backed in. I was always had part-time jobs when my children were little and one of my friends who was a city council member in the city I lived in California told me that the tree organization, executive director job was open in our town and it was a part-time job so I interviewed and I got the job managing the small tree nonprofit. I fell in love with trees, I already liked them, I grew up going to the redwoods and going to the coast of California camping as a kid.

This was just natural for me to really fall in love with this. I took my certified arborist test and got to know some people from Davey and the next thing I knew I was working for Davey Tree. Doug, early on in the pandemic, people were looking for things to do at home and one of the most popular things I've learned is birdwatching. I went to a little store in a town south of where I live, and during Christmas time to get a bird-watching book for my husband to go with his bird feeder that he found out that very early in the pandemic and wow, we've had more fun watching our backyard birds.

I know a lot of other people have as well and we wouldn't have these backyard birds if we didn't have trees in our backyard. I have a large live oak, I have a pine and then I have a huge, huge crape myrtle in my backyard. Some of the biggest trees I've ever had in my yard but there's all kinds of birds that we can look forward to matter where we are in the country. I particularly am fond of remembering an owl that we had in the stone pine in front of our house in California and we called him our owl but everybody in our neighborhood would watch for him and listen for him and he provided a lot of entertainment for us.

We would go get the owl pellets that he would drop and dissect them and look for the little bones from the rats and mice that he would eat. It was like science right in our front yard. It was great.

Doug: Is there a big difference in the birds that you saw in California and the birds that you're seeing in Texas?

Dana: Well, not that big of a difference. I will say though that I am in love with the cardinal and as a lot of people are, but we didn't have cardinals in California. I lived in Nebraska for three years and during that time, the snow with the cardinal juxtapose the red versus the white was absolutely stunning and I love seeing the cardinals. That's been really great.

I haven't seen a ton of owls here but I've seen a lot more small raptor-type birds in Texas. I think because of more of the open field in the ranching here. There's big birds that we think about nesting and trees and a project that we did up in the Dallas region.

There was a rookery on a campus and there were these beautiful cranes that were in this small forest of trees it was right on a campus. Now I will tell you it didn't smell very good but the birds were absolutely stunning. I love nature in the city that way is that we leave a space alone and allow them to be there. We look up when we are going to fly away we see the great cranes, the Sandhill cranes that land in Nebraska and fly up and down the corridor. Those trees provide homes for those migrating birds along the way. It's amazing.

Doug: Here in the east we see rookeries for great blue herons explain what that is though for people who might not know what that is you're talking about? Where the cranes or great blue herons' nest.

Dana: Well it's a stopover site usually and it's a forest of trees that are left untouched I would say for the most part may be maintained when the birds are not in there, but it's a place where they can stop over on the flyover. Then they nest and actually, their babies are born there and off they go when the time is right.

Doug: Then certainly trees that are flowering, basswood, and others are great for pollinators too. I know that when the basswoods bloom here in the east, the honeybees go crazy over it.

Dana: Yes, absolutely and I think about the some of the trees in California with pollinators that I that are long the riparian areas and the big trees sycamores and valley oaks and some of the willows and the cottonwoods all provide that some of that pollinator habitat for birds.

Doug: Dana, what is the best thing about what you do for a living?

Dana: Boy, that's a hard question. I think I love trees. I absolutely love trees and I think there's probably very few people that are in our business who don't love trees. I think the best thing I do is teach people at all levels how important trees are to their environment. Birds is just one part of it. Homes for animals is just one part of it but trees provide so many benefits that I just love the opportunity to share that and that's the best part about my job is helping people understand how critical trees are.

Doug: Well Dana, then I'm going to leave it right there. That is great stuff. Thank you so much for all that information about wildlife and trees and say hi to your friendly squirrels that are running around in your Texas snow.

Dana: Okay, you too. I'll talk to you later Doug. Thank you.

Doug: Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert company. I'm your host Doug Oster. Next week we'll learn about something called tree cabling, what it is and how to know if you need it done in your landscape. Remember on the Talking Trees podcast, we know that trees are the answer.

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