Bird-Friendly Maple at Perry Hill Farm

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]It might surprise you because it's 39° out, but it is actually the perfect time to begin agriculture that is good for birds. Agriculture, don't you need warm temperatures and bought out soil? Nope, not when it comes to making maple syrup.

[00:00:11]I am visiting a maple syrup producer that's partnered with Ottabon's bird friendly maple program in upstate New York, and I want to learn how it's done.

[00:00:16]So, let's go. This is Perry Hill Farm.

[00:00:18]I'm Joshua. My family has owned this farm for about 32 years. One of the main things we do is maple syrup and maple sugaring. We have about 600 taps here.

[00:00:27]We're a fairly small operation. And you can see that's already dripping sap.

[00:00:32]>> Sound of spring there. We kind of view the maple production as a side product of managing our forest in a responsible manner that helps promote biodiversity.

[00:00:41]There are all sorts of birds that we see here. Species of nest way up in the canopy like some wood warblers. Got a lot of oven birds actually on the forest floor. A lot of forests in this area are what we'd call even aged. You have an old field. It grew in with trees all around the same time. They're all roughly the same height. And these are very common because agriculture was very common here. So, a lot of our forests are around 100 to 150 years old. We don't have young forests or very old forests. And these are really important for wildlife. This is a very nice specimen of the black birch, 80 to 100 years old. A lot of producers might come and cut this tree down because there's a young maple right here. And that tree could probably produce more sap if it got more sunlight and was allowed to grow bigger. But this is a really nice tree. Adds diversity to the sand. So, we're keeping it. A lot of what we're doing for management is trying to essentially rehabilitate this land by allowing a new generation of trees to grow up by creating dead standing trees for wildlife to use. Got this dead birch tree here and you can see we've got pilated woodpeckers feeding in it and making the forest a more dynamic complex environment. We're just trying to create a forest that is more resilient, more biodiverse, more able to withstand climate change. It's more resilient in the face of invasive species. Having spent my whole life here on this farm, knowing this forest really well. You can walk into an old earth forest. The biodiversity will scream at you. We actually have a lot of barred owls that have been active very recently. Pretty soon we'll probably have American woodcock coming back. We've had a few nests around that. I've been lucky enough to been able to observe them as the young have gotten older and fledged.

[00:02:02]It's been good to see them using some habitat that we've created and know that what we're doing is actually helping them. It's just such a beautiful thing when you see a young forest full of just inside warblers in the spring. It's those moments like that that I'm motivated to create more