Jim McCormac in his Ohio Birds and Biodiversity blog describes the benefits of sumac thickets as to creating biological hotspots in the landscape. The fruits are a gold mine to birds in the winter!
Jim recommends every yard would benefit from having an assemblage of sumac. Native plants such as these are incalculably more valuable to birds and other animals than the all too common nonnative garden fare. In the sumac world, at least in this part of the world, the best bang for the buck probably comes from the Smooth Sumac, and Staghorn Sumac, Rhus typhina. See if you can find some at an enlightened nursery, and stick 'em in the yard.
Read more at:
http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/2013/12/sumac-creates-biological-hotspots.html
Smooth Sumac http://ohiodnr.com/trees/sumac/tabid/5422/Default.aspx
Staghorn Sumac http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/weedguide/singlerecord.asp?id=431
Ohio Trees Index - http://ohiodnr.com/forestry/treeindex/tabid/5361/Default.aspx