Shelter for Birds.

Part 4. NatureScape Garden.

Trees and shrubs provide the best shelter, food, and nesting sites for non-cavity nesters. A great benefit to wildlife and your Naturescape garden is to plant native trees or shrubs that are infrequent in your area. Let me give you an example. Conifers dominate the upper foothills and the alpine regions. At the lower levels where we live, the dominant trees are deciduous.
In my personal opinion, the spruce is the evergreen tree for the Naturescape Garden, at least in our little corner of the world. When Kathleen and I bought our house at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, we were blessed with five blue spruce trees (Picea pungens), a native to the Rocky Mountains. Pungens means “sharply pointed”, referring to the needles. If you gently hold a twig in your hand and squeeze it, you will feel the sharp points. By rolling a needle between your thumb and finger, you can think that the needle is square in cross-section. This is one of the two methods used to identify this species.