Garden for Wildlife Month: Create a Wildlife Habitat in Your Backyard

Certified Wildlife Habitats not only provide water for wildlife, they use sustainable gardening practices that help ensure our human demands on water are kept to a minimum.

Wildlife needs to find shelter from extreme weather and many species need places to hide from predators, while predators themselves need cover in order to successfully catch prey.

 Native vegetation is a perfect cover for wildlife. Shrubs, thickets, and brushpiles provide great hiding places within their bushy leaves and thorns. Even dead trees provide shelter as a home to lots of different animals, including some that use tree cavities and branches for nesting and perching.

Add a birdhouse for the types of birds you would like to attract to your habitat.

Creating a wildlife-friendly garden or landscape is all about helping wildlife survive.

Providing food, water and cover –> (read Squirreling Away in a Watering Can if you missed it) , will help individual animals continue to survive in your area.

In addition, some species such as amphibians or butterflies have totally different habitat needs in their juvenile phase than they do as adults, so it’s important to offer habitat in all phases of the lifecycle.

Wildlife needs a sheltered place to raise their offspring. Many places for cover can double as locations where wildlife can raise young, from wildflower meadows and bushes where many butterflies and moths lay their eggs.

Providing the four components of habitat—food, water, cover, and places to raise young—will create a wonderful wildlife-friendly garden.

Maintaining your landscape in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way ensures that the soil, air, and water that native wildlife (and people) rely upon stay clean and healthy.

Ways to Conserve Water in Your Garden:

🌱 Mulch planting beds with newspaper, leaves, bark, or wood chips. Mulches retain soil moisture and improve soil quality.

🌱 Water your plantings with a soaker hose or a drip irrigation system. Less water evaporates this way than with a sprinkler, and you target your watering.

🌱 Use a timing device with any watering system.

🌱 Use “wasted” water for your plants. A rain barrel or cistern that captures rainfall from your roof is a great garden reservoir.

Non-chemical, organic gardening practices in your backyard are always the best option for wildlife.

By planting native plants you attract populations of insects such as ladybugs and other carnivorous beetles, dragonflies, parasitic wasps, and praying mantises that keep the balance in the garden by other harmful plant pests.

  Birds, toads, spiders and bats are voracious predators of pests too.

You can download and print a checklist and requirements for your Wildlife Garden, HERE.

And certify your garden as a wildlife habitat, HERE.