Page 11 - GM Winter 2021

2019, when we finally established a nesting pair of Purple Martens around our pond on the eighteenth hole, after trying for eleven years, that we gained a true understanding of why new species were showing up on our golf course. Clarity was established through a comment and photograph from our resident bird expert, Bob Reese. Bob had photographed one of our adult Martens feeding two of its young a dragonfly captured around the pond where their nest box is located. Bob’s comment when hesentmethisamazingpicturewas that the dragonflies were a favourite food source of the Martens and the reason we were able to entice them to raise young here after trying for so many years.
This summer, two nesting pairs of Martens made Cordova Bay their home on the golf course and with four successful clutches of Martens in the past two years, we intend to add boxes for what we expect will be a growing Marten colony here in the future. From this summer’s experience and Bob’s comment, I realized that we had been focusing on habitat enhancement to attract additional species of birds to our golf course without really understanding that the very habitat we were focusing on creating was a habitat
that was also providing a home for a thriving population of beneficial insects, many of which were an important food source for our growing bird populations.
ATTRACTING THE BENEFICIAL BUGS
Over the years, I have watched with interest as the populations of what I now refer to as the beneficial insects, have surged due to the careful organic management of our water bodies, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, meadows, and forests.
Back in the early days of Audubon certification, we initiated a Mason Bee house program to encourage their reproduction. Mason Bees are tremendous pollinators with everyfemalebeingaqueenthatlays her own eggs. Critical to pollination and food production, it only takes 350 Mason Bees to pollinate an entire acre of cherries. Dragonflies, in all stages of their life cycle, are fierce predators of undesirable insects. In its larval stage, which can last up to two years, a dragonfly has a ferocious appetite for mosquito larvae, other insects, and tadpoles. When the dragonfly emerge as adults, they can eat several hundred mosquitoes in a dayandotherinsectssuchasflies and wasps. This stealth predator of undesirable bugs is so efficient at hunting on the fly that they have earned the nickname ‘Mosquito Hawk.’
Lady Bird Beetles, affectionately known as Lady Bugs, are relentless predators of fruit flies, aphids, thrips,
and mites. In fact, a Lady Bug will eat over 5,000 aphids in its adult life stage. Developing and nurturing a thriving Lady Bird Beetle population is as simple as introducing them to your gardens and allowing leaf litter to collect in the gardens in the fall and winter as these insects often lay their eggs in leaf litter in gardens. Every year, we purchase 70,000 additional Ladybugs through WestGrow Biological Solutions to introduce throughout our gardens on both golf courses at a very reasonable cost of under four hundred dollars per year.
Another classification of beneficial insects that largely go unnoticed are several species of predator wasps. This important group of insects are amongst the most important for natural control of insects that are harmful to turf and tree species. Braconids, a very tiny wasp with four wings and a thread like waist, are small and predatory wasps that sting their prey and lay eggs inside the prey’s body. Ichneumonids are a little larger than Braconids. They make their cocoons under the skin of their prey which are usually caterpil- lar or beetle larvae. Tiphids and Scolids are larger than predator wasps. TheyresembleCarpenter Ants with wings and the females burrow into the ground and lay their eggs inside the beetle larvae. They are important in the control of Japanese beetles and June beetles.
Flower beds and ornamental gardens are home to hundreds of
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