Sign up now for your FREE Newsletter. You will receive a Newsletter twice a month providing tips, techniques, and fun projects for your garden. Sign up now
Sign up now.
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 and nuts.
Put out cracked corn for squirrels, deer and other wildlife.
