Wildlife Garden
Create a diverse eco-system in your own backyard.
What's the key to turning your yard into a
refuge for wildlife? Each animal prefers a certain kind of habitat, whether it's
high in the tree canopy or deep in blackberry brambles. By providing a variety
of landscape "niches"—different plant heights and topography—you
will attract a variety of wildlife.
Lawn: Allow a section of grass to remain unmowed, serving as a protected
corridor for still-active frogs, snakes, mice, and insects.
Leaves: Leaf litter under trees shelters insects and spiders in winter.
They, in turn, attract ground-foraging birds, such as juncos, sparrows, and
towhees.
Cornstalks: Leave a few cornstalks standing because they offer shelter
for foraging birds and field mice.
Evergreens: Trees such as pines, firs, spruces, junipers, and cedars
provide important roosting and nesting sites for many birds. Game birds and
small animals seek shelter under the trees' low-hanging branches.
Grasses: The caterpillars of many skipper butterflies feed on switchgrass
and big bluestem, and they overwinter in leaf nests on the plants.
Thickets
If you have space in your yard, reserve a corner for a thicket-forming plant,
such as a snowberry, red-osier dogwood, sprawling rose, or willow. Or plant a
hedgerow, an impenetrable living fence of thorny shrubs and vines. It will
provide safe travel, shelter, nesting sites, and food, all in one. If you can,
include currants, huckleberries, elderberries, hawthorns, roses, black haw,
crabapples, blackberries, and native (not invasive Japanese) honeysuckles, and
such evergreens as junipers or pines. Put plants close together so they can grow
into a tangle.
Dead trees
Always prune for safety, but don't cut down a dying tree or snag if it does not
pose a threat. It may attract cavity-nesting birds and bark beetles that form
tunnels in the wood. Drill holes in the trunk and fill them with suet to attract
woodpeckers. A sap-producing stump or tree, such as a birch, has its own fan
club: sapsuckers, anglewing butterflies, and many small insects, including ants.
Hummingbirds that arrive before flowers are in bloom look for holes made in
trees by sapsuckers. The hummingbirds eat the insects that have been attracted
to the sap in the holes
Serve a homegrown feast
Berries
If you have room for a few trees or shrubs that produce berries, your yard will
be an avian haven. Try to include chokeberries, hackberries, highbush
cranberries, sumacs, inkberries, snowberries, and winterberries. Their fruits
soften and become less tart during months of harsh weather. High in
carbohydrates, they can be lifesavers when there is nothing else left for birds
to eat.
Nectar
Hawthorn, crabapple and willow produce nectar that feeds native bees and flies
that appear in late winter or early spring.
Seeds
Your fingers may itch to cut back globe thistles, coneflowers, milkweeds, and
other spent perennials, but these plants are still useful to a number of insects
and birds. Remove just enough seeds to replant next year; then leave the rest
for the birds. Seeds that aren't eaten might be used for nesting material, such
as the downy fluff of a milkweed. In your vegetable garden, let broccoli,
carrots, fennel, and parsley got to seed for goldfinches and chickadees to eat.
Don't forget treats
· High-calorie suet is vital to keeping birds warm in winter. Just wrap a fist-sized chunk of suet into a red plastic mesh onion bag, then hang it on a sturdy limb of a small tree or shrub.
· Expand the menu by setting out chopped nuts, doughnuts, raisins, and fresh orange and apple halves.
· Treat creatures to a bit of home cooking by making muffins, bread and other snacks with nutritious additions like sunflower seeds & nuts.
· Put out cracked corn for squirrels, deer and other wildlife.
