Creating a Healthy Yard for Birds and You

The Sacramento Audubon Society has a wonderful and very detailed website about making your yard and garden more bird and human friendly based on excerpts from Bringing Nature Home by Tallamy. The premise is that you should introduce more native plants. The challenge has been issued: Take action! Minimize lawn.

The pictures show part of my flower/vegetable garden. But what about the rest of the yard? (Twenty square feet down and 200 to go). We have lived in our home for 25 years, and believe me, I have tried many things to make my yard bird and human friendly (some things have succeeded, some have failed):
1. remove grass: easier said than done when you're dealing with Bermuda grass. Even in my flower beds and garden, I have to continuously go back and dig out more of the pernicious roots. In the book Epitaph for a Peach, the author describes how his farming family for generations has been struggling with Bermuda grass.
2. less invasive plants: we moved in to a well-established suburb and got our quarter acre. The problem is that quarter acre was filled with very invasive plants: ivy (chop and hack, but make sure you dig out the roots) and bamboo (you would be amazed what the roots of bamboo can do to plumbing 15 feet away!).
3. replace with native plants appropriate to the site: this is where it gets tricky. The problem with an old suburban plot is that you don't know where the soil has been! These old suburbs had soil brought in originally from elsewhere. I swear there are parts of my front yard that are toxic to anything, even weeds. My daughter convinced me to do a soil test. In one spot, the alkalinity tested so high that it was off the chart! (No wonder my peppers never grew there).
I think I'm going to have to replace soil before I can replace any more plants.
I like the next suggestion that was made:
4. take it easy. "The transformation from lawn to wildlife habitat takes time. Tackle only as much as you can, remembering that removal must be paired with replacement."
To be continued...