When Windsor, a high-end residential community in Vero Beach, Florida, recently added forty-seven acres to its footprint, the development team brought in a heavyweight: renowned ornithologist John Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the co-creator of eBird, the database powering beloved bird ID app Merlin. “Word got around that I’m in Vero Beach in the wintertime, and Windsor is trying to be genuine in their goal of making this final piece of their development ecologically friendly,” he says. “I’m not a landscape architect by any means, but I do know something about habitats and structure.”
His expertise, coupled with the know-how of the landscaping team—award-winning designer Edwina von Gal and the eco-conscious firm Dept.—will create an avian oasis and an important connector habitat for the nearby Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge. It won’t be a bad place for humans to live either.
And thanks to Fitzpatrick’s baseline bird survey, Windsor will be able to quantify the effects of their work after the property is finished in the next few years. “It’s so exciting that we will have hard numbers to compare in three to five years,” Dept.’s Isaac Stein says. “We’ll be able to share that with other developments so we can all be better stewards of the land.”
Here are a few pointers they might pass on:
First, find out what’s already there.
Before making any landscaping recommendations, Fitzpatrick conducted ten morning visits between the last week of February and the second week of May this year. Using eBird, he recorded everything he heard and saw and ended up with a list of eighty-one species—not bad for a community built on a former citrus farm.
He also had a trick up his sleeve: To document species hiding in dense thickets, he played a soundtrack of an eastern screech owl being mobbed by chickadees—a survey strategy developed by the Cornell Lab a few decades ago. “When you’re a little bird in the woods, you know you’re going to die by something that captures you from behind,” Fitzpatrick explains. “They’re constantly worried about the predators that they don’t know about—so when they hear an alarm call, they don’t go away, they go towards it.” In addition to coaxing out songbirds, he also attracted the resident screech owls themselves, who came to investigate the drama. “By the end, I got to know one little rufous-faced one, because every time I started to play it, this screech owl would come join me.” Flyover species—those that just pass overhead, like anhinga, mottled duck, wood stork, red-tailed hawk, and purple martin—made up about half of his total tally.
Plan for all seasons.
Fitzpatrick divided his list into overhead sightings, resident year-round species, summer-only birds, transient spring migrants, and overwintering birds. Twenty-four species—including pileated, downy, and red-bellied woodpeckers, plus grackles and prairie warblers—went down as permanent residents. The rest fell in line with Florida’s typical seasonal pattern: “The Florida peninsula is a mecca in the wintertime for songbirds, but by the first of May, it gets pretty thin,” Fitzpatrick says. Twenty overwintering species turned up on the property, among them the cedar waxwing, painted bunting, and six kinds of warblers, but there were just three summertime inhabitants.
Welcome wetlands.
Fitzpatrick wasn’t just interested in keeping the birds that were already there, but also in attracting new species. For that, a variety of habitats is needed. Windsor’s landscaping team plans to blur the lines between water and land; between them, wetlands will coax the likes of ducks, herons, egrets, ibises, kingfisher, and gallinules. The addition of reeds, rushes, and cattails, Fitzpatrick says, should attract birds such as the red-winged blackbird, common yellowthroat, and maybe even wintering marsh wrens and swamp sparrows.
They will also create two water sources—one fresh and one brackish, with the latter connecting to the adjacent Indian River Lagoon.
Think about layers.
To draw wintering songbirds like warblers, Fitzpatrick points out that the property will need to offer thickets and winter food sources. Broad swaths of densely forested habitat will include a canopy of oaks (the landscaping team plans to use trees already growing there), a midstory of natives like saw palmetto and wild coffee, and an understory of native shrubs attractive to hermit thrushes and painted buntings.
Find compromise between humans and wildlife.
“There is a balance of what may be visually beautiful to a human and what might be beautiful to, say, a roseate spoonbill,” Stein says. “We find that balance by employing tricks of the trade, like using a consistent species that the human eye sees in a matrix of plants, or using wild grasses as buffer lines.” While human eyes might crave strict order, he says, we can also learn to appreciate different types of beauty—including the chaotic order that exists in nature.
Make the land extra irresistible with nest boxes.
Different types of birdhouses will increase the odds of enticing certain birds—including wood ducks, screech owls, great crested flycatchers, Carolina wrens, and purple martins. Plus, woodpeckers like the northern flicker can occupy the cavities too.
Give it time.
Fitzpatrick believes in the “if you build it they will come” philosophy, but it will still take time for the restored property to settle into a rhythm. Within a few years, he is hopeful that Windsor’s species count could reach over a hundred. “Loads of fertilizers and pesticides were once used here–we call that the legacy,” Stein adds. “It can take awhile for the soil and the worms and the microbes to catch up.”
