Most Common Lawn Pests
Having a perfect lawn is a dream many homeowners strive for. While managing all the basics, including watering, mowing, and fertilising, is fairly straight forward, there’s ...
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Wild birds are natural and wonderful guests to have visit our homes and gardens. In fact, if we have birds regularly visiting our gardens, it’s fair to say we’ve done something right in their care.
While birds foraging on lawn is quite natural, they can become a pest when they develop a slightly unnatural fascination. With the result being that they dig into your lawn and make a real mess.
While the first inclination in protecting our lawn from destruction by birds may be to try and control the birds themselves, the truth is that the birds are not causing the problem.
The presence of birds digging into the turf is indicating that there is something wrong with the lawn, which, as a result, is attracting the birds and promoting their behaviour.
Birds will naturally forage in lawns for either bugs or the bulbs of some weed types such as Guildford Grass.
So birds are actually friends to our lawns by reducing some weeds and pests.
Generally speaking, birds in the Parrot family will most often dig for weed bulbs or corms, while Black and White birds such as Butcher Birds and Magpies will most often dig for lawn bugs.
Excessively destructive bird behaviour begins when there are excessive numbers of pests in the lawn, and the birds go on a slight feeding frenzy with all the available food.
So as we can now see, the birds are not the problem, they are telling us there is a problem that needs to be dealt with in our lawns, and are already helping.
The excessive bird behaviour has now indicated that we have a major pest problem with our lawn, and without directly dealing with the problem as quickly as possible – our lawns could suffer quite badly in a very short space of time.
If the problem is bulbous weeds such as Guildford Grass, then this can be easily dealt with by hiring a professional weed spraying contractor to apply a herbicide.
However, if the problem is pests such as Army Worms, White Curl Grubs, Cutworms or Sod Webworms, we have a major issue to address and you will likely need to get your hands on some insecticides to control the outbreak.
These lawn pests can cause an enormous amount of damage and lawn death once they reach large numbers.
