Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, let’s look into the four basic features that we can provide for wildlife to create a calming, beautiful backyard oasis.
1) Native Plants to Provide Food – Our native plants can directly and indirectly provide all of the food that our local wildlife need to thrive, including nectar, pollen, fruit, and seeds. As host plants for butterflies and moths, they’re also feeding and growing the caterpillars that most songbirds rely on to feed their young. Without native plants, the whole system breaks down, and everything from insects on up will lack the foundation for their nutritional needs.
2) Water Source – Water is a necessity of life, and your landscape should include one or more sources of water for the wildlife that can’t get what they need from their food. Birdbaths and wildlife ponds are more obvious choices, but even wet sand is useful for providing a safe water source for insects that might drown in deep basins, like bees.
3) Shelter – Cover is critical for wildlife to escape the pressures of predation and harsh weather. Evergreens, dense shrubs, brush piles, fallen leaves, and ground covers provide opportunities for creatures large and small to shelter comfortably.
4) A Place to Raise Young – Some wildlife need specific conditions to successfully reproduce and raise their young, so this is another important consideration when creating your habitat. Trees, shrub thickets, the hollow stems of perennials, fallen leaves, and bare soil are all important nesting or rearing locations for a variety of animals. Bare soil is crucial for a majority of our native bee species, and fallen leaves provide the necessary habitat for firefly larvae to develop, as a few examples.
This Earth Day, take a look at your backyard and see if there’s any way you can improve! Do you need to consider adding a brush pile for shelter, or maybe a new water source? Maybe you have plenty of flowers for nectar, but not as many host plants? You might just be a small step or two away from providing a native plant backyard oasis of your own!
