Spring is an important season for birds. In early and mid-spring, migrating species return to their Northern summer homes, a journey that may be hundreds or thousands of exhausting miles, while the birds that stuck around through the long, cold winter try to replace the weight lost during the last hungry weeks of winter. Later, it's nesting time, and adult birds may spend nearly all their waking hours attending to the needs of their voracious offspring.

Gardeners can give their feathered friends a helping hand by carefully choosing plants that provide birds with lots of food and shelter throughout the spring months.

In springtime, even many birds that ordinarily prefer fruit or seeds switch to an insect diet. For birds, insects are a nearly unmatched high-energy treat the provide many important nutrients both to adults recovering from the winter and to their growing offspring. In the United States, 96% of terrestrial birds feed their nestlings primarily on insects, regardless of their dietary preferences as adults.

To attract birds in springtime, therefore, it's good idea to take the plunge and go organic. Insecticides kill not only harmful insects the birds don't eat, but also harmful (and beneficial!) insects they do. Although you might initially see an increase in the amount of insect damage to your plants after switching from conventional to organic gardening, birds and other predators should take over the job you've been doing with chemicals fairly quickly.

It is also a good idea to become a little bit lazier of a gardener. Let fallen leaves stay under trees and bushes, where they will create a lovely leaf mulch that will hide colonies of sowbugs, earthworms, and other decomposers that will be eagerly picked through by birds, as well as helping to improve your soil. Start a brush pile with logs and fallen branches. In addition to providing shelter for birds, the dead wood will host a virtual buffet of wood-dwelling insects.

Research local butterfly species and plant host plants for their caterpillars. Caterpillars are a particularly popular and nutritious food for nestlings.

Overcome that arachnophobia. Although spiders compete with birds, they are also a popular food source for many species. If possible, catch and release spiders you find in the house, instead of killing them, and leave outside webs alone.

Plant a diverse selection of trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers that are native to your region. Some birds do show strong preferences for native plant species, but most are also capable of utilizing foreign exotics, and are generally quite happy to do so, if it produces nutritious or palatable fruit or seeds. In fact, some invasive exotics have become huge problems in the United States because they were so popular among birds, who proceeded to spread the seeds far and wide. Herbivorous insects are rarely so flexible. Thanks to the toxins that plants use to protect themselves against predation, many plant-eating insect species can only eat one family, or even a single species, of plants. Naturally, they are best adapted to plants they evolved with, so it is especially important to plant a diverse array of native plants if you are attempting to attract birds through insect diversity.

Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist and author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens, has studied the connection between native plants (particularly trees and shrubs), insect diversity, and bird diversity for many years, and recommends the following species as being especially beneficial:

1. Oaks (Quercus)
2. Cherries and Plums (Prunus)
3. Willows (Salix)
4. Birches (Betula)
5. Poplars (Populus)
6. Crabapples (Malus)
7. Blueberries (Vacinnium)
8. Maples (Acer)
9. Elms (Ulmus)
10. Pines (Pinus)

Top performing perennial flowers include:

1. Blackberries and Raspberries (Rubus)
2. Goldenrod (Solidago)
3. Asters (Aster)
4. Sunflowers (Helianthus)
5. Joe Pye weed, Boneset (Eupatorium)
6. Morning Glory (Ipomoea)
7. Sedges (Carex)
8. Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)
9. Violets (Viola)
10. Native Geraniums (Geranium)

For a more complete list of plants, please visit Dr. Tallamy's website, or purchase his book.

Building a nest is hard work. For some species, it may take thousands of individual trips to gather materials before the nest is complete. You can make birds' jobs easier by providing a variety of nesting habitats and materials.

The best way to provide nesting habitat is to have a variety of plantings to accommodate different birds' preferences, including a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs of various heights and density, relatively sheltered from wind and unpredictable spring weather. An easy way to provide nesting materials is to allow fallen leaves and twigs to lie where they fall, or collect them into a brush pile or a collections of stashes that birds can pick through looking for the materials they need.

Other good materials include:

• dry grass
• animal or human hair
• yarn or string, cut into 4-8 inch pieces
• feathers
• wool
• pine needles
• bark strips
• shredded paper
• moss

You can place these materials in piles in the ground, push them into tree crevices, hang them in suet feeders or plastic strawberry baskets, and more.

Many birds use mud as a component of their nests, so if you have a drippy faucet, consider waiting until summer to fix it. Alternately, hang a milk carton with a small puncture over a patch of bare dirt, use irrigation hoses in your vegetable garden, or build a water feature or garden pond.