While not everyone will be getting on board with eating insects, they can usually get on board with the birds that do. Purple Martins are a bird-watcher's favourite, and they're eating all the bugs currently before they fly south for the winter.
This is according to Wildlife Ecologist with the Fish, Wildlife and Lands Branch of the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment, Katherine Conklin.
"They're a fairly common bird on the prairies," she said, noting the big beautiful birdhouses one often sees in the yard of a birder, are typically Purple Martin houses. They're aerial insectivores, and they're great for the environment. They're good birds to have around."
She said those birdhouses are a good way to attract them, but most people like them and don't tend to try to deter their presence.
"They'll congregate around areas with insects, certainly as they're migrating south, they're trying to get their fat levels up because it got a really long trip ahead of them and a long way to go. So they will be trying to feed extensively before their migration."
Conklin said they eat a wide variety of aerial insects.
"They typically take the insects on the wing. Grasshoppers are often the common one, but they're generalists in that, they'll take quite a few different insects on the wing."
With an extensive birding community in the province, she said, those who observe the birds are reporting their observations to eBird.
"It's a great resource for anyone interested in knowing a bit more about birds and where they might find it in the province, or track observations, you can post any observations you have of any species."
"The other really exciting thing that just happened in our province, was the Saskatchewan Breeding Bird Atlas, and that was a very formal effort that was undertaken by Birds Canada to look at birds across the province, and they broke the province into 10-kilometre square blocks, and over five year period, had an army of volunteers serving both passively just reporting what they saw and then doing more formal point counts, and audio recordings were put out, but that was a really expensive effort. So they just finished that last summer and now they're in the writeup phase and they're getting ready to publish a pretty amazing resource."
She said the breeding bird atlas is common across North America, and they're typically done at intervals and you can see changes over time, but this is the first major effort for Saskatchewan.
According to the '3 billion birds lost' initiative, Conklin pointed out that aerial insectivores are currently one of the most at-risk bird populations, so encouraging them with houses is a great way to help ensure they survive.