KFI AM six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp The House Whisper on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Hey, welcome home. I'm Dean Sharp the House Whisper. I design custom homes and on the weekends. Right now, I am your guide to better understanding that place where you live. We love, love, love talking about your home, whether it's architecture, design, construction, DIY stuff, all things that make a home truly a home.
And guess what we're doing today on the show. Well, I had mentioned this yesterday for those of you who don't live in southern California, we are having a real, live, actual spring. I mean the kind of spur that other places in the country regularly have. I don't know why, I don't know what it means afterwards, but normally and so cal you know, I was born in raised here. Normally spring pops in, you know, a good month ago, and it's just a slightly cooler version of summer, just
sunny every day and warm but not hot. But this weather, this weather, it's rain, it's sunshine, it's cloudy, it's misty, then it's sunny again. Now it's cold, now it's warm. This is a legitimate, full blown North American spring that we're having. And we weren't thinking about this kind of weather when we put our show schedule together. But today we are talking about spring, and I'm talking about the life that is happening or could be happening in your
own yard. Every springtime, I take some time to give attention and draw information up on birds, bees, flowers, trees. Yeah, I know it rhymes. I didn't mean for that to happen, but and today's the day. Today, I've got three get I should say, up to three guests on the show. I hope they all show up, but the plan is to have three guests on the show today. We're going to be talking first about backyard birds and how to bring more of that life and beauty and how important
it is as a home designer. It's critically important for me to introduce you to the ways to bring the nature that our homes displace back into our yards. So we'll first be talking to my good friend Richard Armording from wild Birds Unlimited today and we're going to get kind of the update on birds, and then my dear friend Nicole Palladino from Bee Catchers is going to update
us on the state of bees. And then I hope certified arboras Bob Loft will be in here with me to talk about what we should and shouldn't be doing with our trees this time of year. Too many people do too much to their trees this time of year. So if any of that applies to you, you are not going to want to miss it. Let me introduce our awesome team. Elmer is on the board. Good morning, Elmer,
Good morning, Dean. Elmer has such energy today, I'm gonna tell you because he's working on like two hours sleep. So it was a good night last night, Elmer. It was a good night. You did your job, and so now he's making it work for us. Producers. Matt and NICKI are standing by to take calls, and yes, I am going to try and take calls today. So there they are. They are they are here? Are they are they near mic?
Yeah?
They mic both here? All right, turn them on. I can't see him here. Hello, Hello, good hello, Hello, Hey guys. It's good to talk to you. You know, it's almost it's so rare that you guys are actually near a microphone when I'm introducing you in the mornings, because you're already screening calls. I already see one call up on the board anyway, us saying hi and so happy that you guys are here. Thanks for having us. And you can tell Nikki, you can tell from her accent that
she is from Georgia. I'm pretty or Kentucky. I'm pretty sure he's south right here. And of course, my buddy, Eileen Gonzalez at the news desk, Good morning, Eileen, Good morning, Dean. How's it going. It's going good, It's going good. It's cloudy and rainy and drizzly, but you know, it's springtime, so I'm embracing the whole thing. Do we have a tea of choice this morning? Oh? We're three cups in, Oh ginger lemon to start today. Ease myself in, and
now two cups of green tea later. I'm ready to go. She had an entire plan, She had a full on she had a full on tea strategy. I did he planned it out all right? Well, all right, so the team is here taking good care of you along with me, I would normally say, sitting across the table from me, my better half, Tina, she is here, She is here. I think she's just stepped out of the studio talking to Nicole Palladino right now, but we will hear from Tina. I promise we'll get her back in here so she
can say hi to everybody. All right, let's get started, shall we. We will sit down here in just a couple of minutes and have a discussion about backyard birds with my very special guest, Richard armor Ding.
Right after you're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Dean Sharp, the house whisper here at your service to help you take your home to the next level. And the way that we are doing that today is we're talking about springtime, the birds that visit us, the bees, all of those kinds of things that we actually want more of in our gardens. Let's start off today with birds, and I have my dear friend, very special guest, Richard Armording, who is the owner of wild Birds Unlimited out here in Thousand Oaks, and my own resident bird expert. Richard.
Thanks for being on the program again, my friend, thanks for having me. Let's talk about the state of birds right now.
Springtime is an exciting time and for birds and for the birds in our backyard. Spring's nesting season, and so birds are very active building nests, attracting mates, feeding their babies once they hatch. So there's a lot of great activity. The usually the male birds are singing a lot because they want to establish territories, they want to attract a female, so there's a lot of great sounds. There's a lot of great activity.
So it's the dating scene, the dating and the family scene happening all around us. Another just side note, and we'll talk more about this with one of our other guests this morning. But not a great time to kind of randomly prune trees.
Definitely not. Birds are building nests and one of the things they do is they try very very hard to make the nests invisible because they want their babies to be safe from predators, and so they go to great lengths to make them almost impossible to see. And so if we're out there trimming our trees, we may not see a nest that's got eggs or chicks in it.
So once that's disrupted, that's it. That's most of the time. Yeah, I mean, there's the rare story of like I put the nest back up in it. Yeah, But yeah, but.
If a nest falls out with eggs in it, the eggs are going to crack. If the babies are not self sufficient and they fall on the ground, there's a good chance that they won't make it. So springtime is not a good time to do any kind of tree pruning. It's best to wait until fall. October, November, early December is the best time.
For the sake of the trees and for the sake of the birds as well. Yeah, because birds the little misnomer, big misnomer. I think a lot of people, other than maybe Big Bird on Sesame Street, birds don't live in nests. They don't live in their nests.
No, that really the only time they use nests or holes in trees is when they are actually sitting on eggs or feeding babies that have hatched before the baby's fledge.
So we don't have to worry about that nest, come fall, that abandoned nest.
Right, if you find a nest in a tree in the fall, you know, anytime after about July or August, it's almost certainly not going to be in use.
What is the how do you relate to people when coming to the store. What's the importance of backyard birds.
Birds put a smile on people's face. They you know, they come in and they've got some big grin on their face. They say, oh, guess what I saw in my yard today. I saw a woodpecker at my bird feeder. I've never seen one before, and they're just so happy. It brings them joy.
As a as a home designer, you wouldn't think that birds would be part of my purview, right you Like, you're supposed to be building houses and stuff like that.
But here's a reality something that that I've noticed that is well, it's it's something I've learned that's part of a and I'm very grateful about this, a new surge of what we call biophilic design inside the architectural community, and that is a love embracing the love of nature, embracing nature bringing it inside, at least visually and audibly.
And one of the things that we've learned that for a human being, when it comes to distressing a human being, there is literally nothing more distressing audibly than the sound of bird song. And they've run these studies now up against you know, kind of like that relaxation tonal stuff that you can get on an app, which is lovely or total silence. You know, everybody I think understands that the noise of the city is literally city noise, urban noise,
traffic noise. It is literally it translates into the human psyche as stress. There's no avoiding that. Right. People may love, they say, I love living in the city, but the fact of the matter is that noise is stress. I mean for everybody, city dwellers and country dwellers alike. But when when we sit there and actually monitor brain wave response and stress levels, cortisol levels. Okay, so what's the alternative to this silence? Is that the most relaxing thing?
Is it this binaural music stuff that we you know, the gray noise and the white noise that we've developed, or the blue noise or bird song and you and there's no competition between them. Studies have shown that bird's song relaxes. And I have a theory about this, well, others have a theory about it, but I agree with it. And that is for all of this time, for millions of years, we've lived essentially an outdoor life, and birds being so hyper sensitive about the presence of predators or
threats or fire or whatever. Right that anytime there is a threat happening in nature, birds go silent because they don't they don't want to give off their location. Right, Okay, So there is something that even if you'd never realize that, if you don't even know that, there's something about waking up in the morning and hearing a yard full of birds just happily going about their business that, on some I don't know, evolutionary subconscious level tells our minds, Hey,
everything's okay, everything is okay. That is just miraculous and wonderful. It really is. It really is. So birds song is something that we really need as human beings.
Yeah. Yeah, the color of the birds is great. To watch, the sound of them singing, the movement, just the activity. It all plays an effect on our brains helps us to relax, take stress away.
Awesome. Okay, so we're gonna take a break. When we come back, I want to talk to you about how do people get started? Just like, all right, I'm convinced now I need birds, and but I have not heard I have no idea what to do. And then we're also you and I need to talk about my current life list here, okay, my current count of birds. You're not. You are not. You're gonna laugh because yours is like
four times as big. Anyway, all right, we are going to continue this talk with my very special guest, Richard armor Ding from wild Birds Unlimited. Can you hang on for another segment? Absolutely? All right.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI Am sixty.
Dean Sharp the house whisper here with you on yet another lovely spring Sunday morning, and today we are talking about life in your backyard, not just that new outdoor kitchen that you want, or the new hard escape or the new patio, but the real power of our backyard, and that is bringing life, landscape, nature back, bringing us much nature back. At every home, whether it's a human home or an animal home, displaces some other part of nature.
If a gopher digs a tunnel underneath the field in the middle of a prairie, that gopher has displaced things, its life has displaced what was there previously. Humans displace nature. We just have to face that fact. Again. We don't have to feel overly guilty about it, but it is a reality that we should face. And if we are planning our homes well, then after we have our home in place. We should do everything we can to bring as much nature back into that zone as possible so
that we have this thriving ecology around us. And there are one hundred different reasons why it is good for us to have that nature close at hand. And we're talking about that today specifically, right now, we're talking about birds, backyard birds with my very special in studio guest, Richard Armor Dang, owner of wild Birds Unlimited out here in Thousand Oaks. Richard, getting started, you, of all people, are imminently qualified to tell us is because that's what wild
Bird's Unlimited is all about, getting people started. So let's say we got no clue, but we've decided, you know, all right, deans convinced me I need birds in my yard. I don't have birds in my yard. What do I do?
It's real simple to get started. You need food for the birds. Is gonna be the first thing you want to do to attract them into your yard. A simple little feeder with some bird seed in it, particularly sunflower seed. It's called black oil sunflower seed. Almost all of our backyard birds love to eat it. And it's real simple to get started. Do you hang up a feeder, you put some bird seed in it, wait a little while, and the birds will show up.
Now, what about those people. I've already heard some folks say, Hey, you know, I heard some guy talking about the fact that feeding birds in my backyard is disrupting their normal cycle, all of that kind of stuff, like we shouldn't be feeding birds.
Well, birds when there is a bird feeder available, only get about one fifth of their diet from the bird feeder. The rest of their diet comes from natural sources. So if that feeder were to go empty for a period of time, they would not starve. They would just simp one of their other food sources.
So we're not acting like drug dealers where we're making the birds dependent upon us, and it's supplemental.
It is we're making their life a little bit easier, and we reap the benefit of that by being able to see them and hear them in our yard. So the birds enjoy it, they have a relatively easy meal, and we get the benefit of having them right there in front of us.
Okay, So now you talked about sunflower seeds, black oil, sunflower seeds as a kind of a universal just a great easy you know, I mean broad spectrum kind of food, but you guys sell very specific mixes to attract different kinds of birds.
Yes, to some extent, there are specific birds that like to eat specific foods. There are some birds that are strictly insect eaters. Bluebirds, for example, almost entirely their entire diet is almost all insects, so they are unlikely to go for sunflower seed. But there are other things that you can put out that will attract these other kinds of birds. There are other kinds of birds that aren't particularly fond of sunflower seeds, so millet is another option.
Peanuts are very popular with certain birds. So as you get more and more into it can expand the types of foods that you're putting out for birds and increase the variety.
Of birds that you see in your yard. So by expanding that you can draw more in and different sizes of birds as well. You know, we've got a woodpecker. We have two woodpecker feeders that we use that have larger nuts and things like that. For the larger birds like blue jays and woodpeckers are very much attracted to that and they stay away from the smaller feeders, which you know, the wrens and the sparrows and the finches just mob on a daily basis and it's great just
to have everybody around, everybody around. And then there are plants that we've got, like we have a lot of sage in our backyard that the hummers, the hummingbirds love. Yes, Now, if you don't have those kinds of things, there are hummingbird feeders as well.
Yeah, hummingbird feeders are another supplemental food. Hummingbirds get more than half of their diet from eating insects. They catch little flying insects and that makes up about sixty percent of their diet. But they also like to eat nectar from flowers, which is essentially sugar water. So if you have a hummingbird feeder with sugar water in it, you can put that somewhere where you can attract the hummingbirds to someplace maybe where you can see them.
A little bit easier. And why are hummingbird feeders always red?
Well, most of the flowers that they like to eat from are red, and so they are just naturally attracted to the color red, and so hummingbird feeders have been made red to help to attract them.
And do we know why hummingbirds are naturally attracted to red as opposed to just all the other flowers out there. I do, you do? I do? Tell me, I'm going to learn something. Okay, here's the thing, right, So, when it comes to nectar, who are the only other individuals that hummingbirds are competing with? Bees? Bees? Bees have an incredible span of of vision in their spectrum, but their spectrum of vision moves from our normal spectrum and slides
far into the ultraviolet, the blue side of things. So bees see bright colors in certain flowers that you and I think are just drab and just normally fade in. But they don't. They don't see red. Red flowers are
relatively meaningless to a bee. They are not out there flashing, hey, nectar source and I believe that somehow evolutionarily, hummingbirds who get frustrated arriving at a flower to find out that the bees have already drained it, have gravitated towards because the hummingbirds can see into the red spectrum really well. So hummingbirds go for red flowers because they know that the bees haven't been there. That makes a lot of sense,
and that's just again, just amazing right, just amazing. All right, we're going to take a break. Can you stay for one more with sure, We're gonna take a break, We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about my Feeble Life list, which will maybe impress a lot of people, but the
goal is to get people excited about that. And then also when it comes to the feeders, let's talk about the prop the problematic practicality, Squirrels, rats, rodents, the things that also get attracted around bird feeders that we don't necessarily want an abundance of in our yard. So you can hang on, I can all right.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Always a privilege and a pleasure to be with you on a Sunday morning, especially a beautiful spring Sunday morning. And I say that in all seriousness. It doesn't matter whether it's cloudy or rainy or sunny where you are. Springtime is just a beautiful time of year. Southern California is actually having here's an unexpected thing. We are having a full blown traditional spring. There are days in which there is sunshine and warmth and water falling from the
sky and clouds all in the same day. That is called spring everywhere else in the world, and we are having it. And so we're talking about the benefits of spring, what's happening in spring around us, especially at our homes, in our backyards, and how to maximize the life that is happening there. We're talking about birds right now, backyard birds with my very special guest, Richard Armording from wild Birds Unlimited. He's the owner operator of the wild Birds
Unlimited out here in Thousand Oaks. Okay, so we've talked about getting started, let's talk about the problems that people bring up. I put a bird feeder in my backyard and the next thing, you know, it was covered. You know, we had rats everywhere, or squirrels were stealing all the food, and so I gave up.
Yeah, those are real common issues that people bring up. They come in the store, their fresh straded. There are some solutions. Squirrels are a challenge because they are very clever, they're very agile, they are very tenacious. They don't give up easily. But there are ways that you can feed the birds without feeding the squirrels. Rats are insidious in southern California. They're all over the place. If there is a lot of bird food that gets dumped on the ground,
they're going to find it. But there are some solutions to that too, to keep the amount of food that goes onto the ground out of very minimum.
Okay, so let's talk about the rats first. Because the rats, rats and mice are they're not as athletic as squirrels. No, squirrels are like super I mean, they are incredible. We
have just so everybody knows. You know, of course, we have squirrels around here, and we've taken all the steps that you're about to hear Richard describe, and still one squirrel, one squirrel has figured out how to how to break through, and still and I'll have to describe to you how how she gets over to the feeder, at which point Tina and I are like, you know what, buddy, have it, have at it. You have earned it. You know, he's not depleting the supply that bad. And we're like, we're
proud of you. We're so proud that you have gotten through all of these hurdles, and so you deserve every little seed you get there. But generally speaking, they all work. But let's talk about rats first, because rats have certain limitations. Rats can't jump four feet vertically in the air or anything like that. Right, So the real concern with rats is the refuse, the stuff that spills out onto the ground. How do you stop that?
Well, the first thing you want to do is use a blend of seed that doesn't have a lot of filler seed or any filler seed in it. A lot of seed blends that you get maybe at the grocery store, at the hardware store, they put seeds in there that are very inexpensive. They want to bring the price down, but the birds aren't interested in needing them, so they just throw them on the ground and that becomes a food source for the rats. So there is a big
difference in birds seed absolutely. Okay, we mentioned before sunflower seed is what most of the birds like to eat. But there's other very common seeds that go into mixes, like a seed called red milo. It's these little red balls. The birds won't touch it. I see that all the time in those little package. You can see all the red specks in there. Yeah, they have no interest in it. Birds have no interest in it. But the rodents on the ground they love it. They're happy with it.
Yeah, what about shells like you talked about sunflower seeds before.
Yeah, the birds don't eat the shells. They crack up in the shell, they eat the inside, they throw the shell on the ground. Those shells sometimes have little bits of seed left in them, and that can be an attractive source for the rodents on the ground as well. So one option is to use seed that doesn't have shells on it. We have what's called our no Mess seed blends. It's just the edible part of the seed.
The birds eat it all. They don't drop those shells on the ground, and that's one less thing that's on there down there to attract those unwanted rats.
So without that just sort of detritus laying around, it's just it. And we have found that, just so everybody knows to be absolutely true. We use only no Mess seed blends. So they are all pre shelled, right, They are just the seed itself, all seeds that the birds want, right, so they don't throw excess away. But of course, you know, I mean, they're not sitting there with napkins and silverware.
Birds are not very neat feeders, so some fall to the ground even when I refill the bird feeders, you know, some of it falls onto the ground. But what we notice is as we're out watching the birds hit the feeders, that the larger birds, like our mourning doves, who aren't going to sit on these small feeder perches, they will be the first ones down on the ground. We'll we'll have finches and sparrows and all sorts of stuff happening
up above and down below. The turtle doves all fly in occasionally a jay or something like that, some of the larger birds, and they're just cleaning up around the bottom. And honestly, at the end of the day, there are no seeds laying on the ground underneath our seat, our feeders, yep, and therefore no rats.
Yeah, the doves like you mentioned, and there's other birds like junkos and toys that love to eat on the ground.
They're your cleanup crew there, it is. Okay, So now squirrels tricky. They're tricky squirrels. We really should get the feeders up off the ground to a certain degree and away from objects that they can cling to and then jump over, because they've got a pretty good horizontal you know, leaping rang.
Yeah, they can jump eight to ten feet horizontal.
Yes, they can but most of the time squirrels not being stupid, they're gonna come down from above if they can. And that's where like a squirrel baffle comes into play. Yeah, there's a couple different kinds of squirrel baffles. There's baffles that can stop them from climbing down from above, like you mentioned. There's also baffles that you can put on a pole if you've got hanging from a pole, to stop them from climbing up that pole. To keep them
away from the feeder. Again, they are very good jumpers, so you have to keep that feeder far enough away
from trees or fences that they can jump from. And there are squirrel proof feeders as well that have mechanisms on them that close off with the extra weight of the squirrel to keep them they get to the feeder, to keep them from eating the food that's in there, right, because the little perches there are like spring loaded, right, And the birds who weigh nothing because hollow but I mean birds just weigh nothing when they're sitting there, no problem.
But as soon as the weight of this you know, relatively large roadent gets on there, their own weight pulls the door shut. Yep. And so it's just like, oh.
Right, and they learn pretty quickly that they're not going to get any food out of and they don't waste their time with it. Yep, all right, Oh my gosh, we ran all right, we're real quick. We're running late, but real quick. In my yard, I have made a life list, a life list for those of you who don't know nerd bird community stuff. Life lists are like what what a birder? All the birds that a birder
has spotted. We've made a specific lifeless just for our yard because we want to keep track of and keep encouraging bird species. And when people say, okay, so how many species on your lifeless, and they're always shocked when I say, well, as of right now, I've got thirty eight different species of birds. And most people are like, oh my god, thirty eight species that I thought there were just a few sparrows and stuff out there.
People are always amazed, except you. You're not amazed because when I first proudly told you, Richard, listen, I got my I'm up in the thirties, and you're like, good, you got like you sort of like patted me on the head. You pat them. That's a good, that's good. That's a good starting because how many birds have you got in your yard? I don't know the exact number, but it's in the nineties, oh my god, the nineties.
And I've read about people in certain parts of the country that have like two hundred birds on their yard list, and that.
I understand because I just think everywhere else is just more plentiful than here in so many ways. But the fact of the matter is, I mean, you live right here with us, and so ninety different species of birds that can and will come into your home.
Yeah, some of those are rarities that probably will never ever show up again. But you know, just over the course of twenty some odd years, we've been keeping real good records of what we see. We're constantly looking out in the yard, and when something new shows up, we get really excited.
So do we? So do we? I mean, I'm excited about my thirty eight right now because they are regular customers. Yeah, there's only a couple of like rare sightings on there. Otherwise they are just regular attendees of life in our yard, and we're so proud of they're your friends, and that's something that everybody can achieve. Yes, if I can achieve thirty something, You're like, oh, that's easy, that's easy, Richard. Thanks so much for spending the time this morning a pleasure.
All right, y'all, you are listening to Home with Dean Sharp on KFI. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on k PHI A M. Six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or any time on demand on the iHeart Radio app.