YVAS Links

Planning A Backyard Wildlife Habitat

The first step in planning a backyard Wildlife Habitat is to assess your property or the garden space as it is right now, identifying the habitat elements that already exist for wildlife. Plants that provide food; seeds, fruit, and nuts and insects, for example, are important to birds and small mammals. Dense shrubbery, a stand of evergreens or a brush pile will provide cover for many animals, and protection from wind and predators.

Take an inventory of everything in your yard, focusing on the names, sizes and locations of all existing plants. Using the plan below as one example of the many habitat elements you might include in your habitat, make a drawing to scale that shows where pathways, plants, fences, large rocks, and other objects are located.

Try looking at your yard from an animal‚s point of view! Is there a dying tree in the corner of the yard you were thinking of removing? The knotholes could provide a perfect home for a family of woodpeckers, or a colony of honey bees. Is there a pile of brush that isn‚t very attractive? It could be tidied up just a bit and continue to provide just the protection a mother rabbit needs to safely bear and raise her young. (You could also let a vine cover it.)

While assessing your yard for habitat elements, take the time (weeks, months, years)to become familiar with the birds and other animals native to your region. Learn which species regularly migrate through your part of the country each year, and might need "temporary room and board" along the way. As you learn the possibilities, consider the size of the space you want to devote to a Backyard Wildlife Habitat and which kinds of animals you want to attract.

Some people are primarily interested in attracting butterflies, for example. Planting beds of fragrant, brightly-colored flowers in full sunlight, like butterfly bush, milkweed or cosmos which will attract butterflies. Others want to invite birds, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and frogs to their mini-wildlife refuge. Their planning and planting activities will vary with the habitat area they envision.

When you decide on the Backyard Wildlife Habitat you want and start to develop it, check with your local municipal authorities about regulations regarding lawn care and weed control. In some areas, it may not be legal to let grassy areas grow unmown or to grow certain plants.

Don‚t forget to plan space for people, too! A wooden bench or mossy-green spot near a small pool or shade tree can be your own private haven to share with wildlife. And children love secret spots in the garden where they can hide, think, get away from big people, and learn about the natural world in their own way, at their own pace.

Now finalize your backyard Wildlife Habitat plan and go to work! You won‚t be able to accomplish everything at once, of course, that‚s why people enjoy gardening for wildlife year after year, making changes and improvements as they learn.

But you can provide some of the elements in your Backyard Wildlife Habitat right away, by filling a new birdfeeder with sunflower seed, starting a brush pile for small animal cover, planting scarlet morning glories for hummingbirds, or filling a shallow dish, like a large clay saucer, with water and placing it near existing shrubbery.

Even your first few steps will reward you with results as wildlife is attracted to your new Backyard Wildlife Habitat.

This excerpt is from "Backyard Wildlife Habitat," Publication ECD11 from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). (Contact Beth Stout with the NWF at STOUT@nwf.org for more information.)

Certificate # 21608

NWF's Backyard Wildlife Habitat Program