For more than two decades, Wild Farm Alliance (WFA) has provided just that—an alliance—between farmers and wildlife advocates. Based in California, the group is focused on finding common ground between two groups that have often been at odds in an effort to address the biodiversity crisis while helping farms benefit from adding more wildlife to their operations.

Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” Baumgartner spoke with us about the one of the group’s core efforts in recent years: building awareness about the value of birds on farms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why focus on birds?

We have a goal of [adding] a million nest boxes and perches on 10 percent of farmland in the U.S. Our audience is mainly growers, and so we want to show them where they can see the benefits, but we also want to educate them about the need for nature to be supported. There are so many species in decline and so many ways that farmers can help, because agriculture comprises almost 60 percent of the landscape [in the U.S.] when you count all the grazing lands, and it’s a huge footprint. With farmers’ help, we can do a lot to reduce the biodiversity crisis, and they can benefit from it.

Some readers may be more familiar with how birds can eat farmers’ crops than the ways they can interact with farmlands positively. How are you working to shift the narrative?

Well, a few years ago, we published this booklet called Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Best Birds [that detailed ways farmers can reduce their pest-control costs by hosting more songbirds during their nesting season]. And before that, most of the growers I talked to—even growers that were finding lots of creative ways to support biodiversity—the first thing they wanted to tell me was about how birds had wrecked something on their farm. But I don’t hear that so much anymore. There are a lot more people we need to reach, but growers are starting to learn that there are so many beneficial things that birds do related to pest control, and different kinds of birds offer different kinds of pest control.

It’s just like some people think all insects are bad. But really there are beneficial insects, and there are insects that can be harmful, but most of them are good. And with birds, there a few that are bad for farms some of the time.

It seems like both need to be kept in balance, and when they get out of balance is when it’s a real problem for farms?

Yes! We’ve collected around 120 avian pest-control studies and broken it down into different crops in different temperate climates; 90 percent of the studies showed that birds were important. And, not all researchers did the exact same study. Some of them were asking, “Is habitat nearby important?” Yes, it is: The more habitat you have, the more pest control benefits you get. And some asked, “Is it important to have nesting boxes?” And yes—you get more pest control benefits with nesting boxes.

Five percent of the studies showed that while birds were helpful, they also were harmful. So, for instance, in the spring, blackbirds eat all kinds of [harmful] insects when they’re feeding. But later in the year, they may potentially harm, say, a sunflower crop because they’re flocking birds. It’s really the big flocks of birds that can be a problem and there are very few species that do that.