If you are a keen rose grower or maybe enjoy the produce of your vegetable plot then you will know how difficult it is to keep away the pests. You can be sure that whatever is your favourite plant in your garden there is a bug or beetle around making life difficult.

You could use pesticides and chemicals to rid you of these pests but I think we are all aware of the ecological effects of chemicals in our environment and especially if you are growing veg or fruit you will want them as natural as possible to get that home grown taste.

By now you will have probably worked out where I'm going with this, it's easy to take garden birds for granted but if you can make your garden a comfortable place for them to be, to feed, to rest and to play the will pay you back by eating every bug and beetle they can find. Now you may think that if you use bird feeders they will ignore the natural food and keep to the nuts and suet, but you would be surprised, once you have created a haven for your garden birds they will be spending a good deal of time there and that includes hopping about and doing bird type things, which includes hunting for bugs amongst the beds and bushes, it's their natural behaviour and so the more birds you have in your garden the more effective they will be at keeping the pests down.

Other Useful Jobs

It's not just pest control that the local bird life are skilled at, there are plenty other jobs they will do for you while they are in your garden. I'm sure at some stage you will have seen a finch hopping about on your lawn pecking at the ground a rooting for worms, a big garden worm is a tasty meal for birds and they are always keen to find them, well, once again they are helping us out, by pecking and rooting around on the grass they are aerating the top surface of the grass which will aid growth of your lawn and help it remain healthy and green.

The next job your garden birds will help you with is re-seeding of plants, this may not be an exact science but if you are a fan of a natural garden then they will be a useful and completely natural way of distributing the seeds of your favourite plants around the garden at just the right time of year, if can be a great surprise when you see where it turns up next year. This works when the birds are eating the berries and seed pods of the plants in your garden. They aren't the most careful of eaters and will clean themselves after a meal, when they do this they wipe their beak on a branch allowing the left over seeds to fall back to the earth and re-seed.

The other natural method of seed distribution happens when they finally go to the toilet, not all the seeds will have been digested and the bird deposit will provide perfect nutrients to get the seeds off to a great start in the soil where they fell.

So you get all these jobs done for you by simply inviting your local neighbourhood birds into your garden.

So get those bird feeders up, make or buy a bird bath for them and help them to help you this year in your garden, they will thank you for it!