Here's Why So Many Birds Are Pecking At Your Lawn

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Having birds visit your yard is a delight. You watch them fly around, fluff their feathers, and engage in everyday routines like feeding and bathing, and it gives you a wonderful feeling of being connected with nature. However, if these same feathered friends land on your lawn and start digging and jabbing at your beautiful grass, that's not something to smile about. And the question on many people's minds becomes: why are all these birds digging at my lawn? Well, the most common reason is usually that they're hunting for food, especially insects and pests, with the main target being grubs. In fact, an increase in bird activity is one of the signs you have a lawn grub problem on your hands.

Lawn grubs are the larvae of garden beetles. They are like worms, but you can distinguish them by their typical C-shaped fleshy white bodies with a brown head, little legs at the front and a dark backside. These pesky creatures are a delicacy for birds, but their presence in your lawn is bad news because they usually feed on the grass roots, which slowly but surely weakens your turf and destroys your grass. You might not spot these little guys in the yard because they live below the surface of the lawn. So as birds descend to feast on them, they inevitably make ugly holes in the ground as they dig them out.

As birds peck at your lawn, leaving behind divots and turned-up sections of the grass, they're still doing you a great service by reducing the grub population, which can cause even worse damage. That said, any kind of destruction to your lawn isn't something to tolerate, so it makes sense to want to stop those birds from foraging your lawn. The solution is to remove whatever is attracting them to your turf, i.e., the grubs.

One of the best ways to get rid of grub worms is to apply pesticides to your lawn. If you go for a quick-acting one like this BioAdvanced 24-Hour Grub Plus for Lawns, the grubs can be eliminated pretty quickly. Alternatively, you can banish pesky grubs from your lawn with a natural solution such as neem oil, which interferes with the growth cycle of the bugs and causes them to eventually die. Applying beneficial nematodes is another effective and natural solution. Nematodes are microscopic worms that, once applied on the lawn, use grubs as a host and feed on their tissue, killing them. 

You might also want to address the birds themselves by keeping them off your lawn. One of the best ways to do this is by putting up visual or auditory deterrents that resemble predators, such as a plastic owl statue. Try a combination of these solutions and you'll eventually succeed at stopping the destruction of your lawn.