Create a Backyard Habitat
Make Your Yard Suitable for Birds, Butterflies, and Other Animals
Apr 17, 2009
You can easily create a wildlife habitat in your own backyard. Attract birds, butterflies, and other wildlife to your personal space and reap the rewards of observing them.
What is a backyard habitat? It is a garden that provides essential resources for different types of wildlife. A butterfly habitat is easily achieved by planting host plants for the butterflies and creating places for food, water, and shade and hiding places. You don’t need much room for this type of habitat. Other backyard habitats are elaborate and need lots of room. It is important to create habitats since the wild fields that support birds and butterflies are swiftly disappearing. To ensure the existence of some wildlife backyard habitats are essential.
What Do You Have to Work With?
In order to create a habitat you must first look around your yard and decide what factors you already have. This will help you to decide what kind of habitat would be the easiest or hardest (if you like a challenge) to build. You may have many red flowers, a butterfly bush, and some nice shade trees. To build a butterfly habitat you would only need to plant more flowers that would attract butterflies, install a few butterfly feeders, provide some shallow water with pebbles in it to enable butterflies to drink, and possibly put in a few butterfly houses. A wild bird habitat would require trees, birdhouses, bird feeders, bird baths and such. During your first step, write down what flowers, plants and trees are already growing in your yard. Next you must find out which ones are native to your area. Which plants will provide food, such as seeds and fruit and which ones will provide hiding places or nesting areas. Dead or dying trees are excellent places in which woodpeckers, squirrels and insects reside. Make a list of what you have or can easily get such as bird feeders, rock walls, or log piles (also good places for wildlife to reside). Assess how much sun your yard receives per day and what soil conditions are present.
Four Essentials for a Habitat
All wildlife require four basic elements. Those are food, water, cover, and places to raise young. In order to have a backyard habitat you must have these four things.
After you decide what type of habitat you wish to create, grow plants that provide food such as fruits, seeds, nuts, and nectar. Remember that your habitat is not only a summer retreat, it must function all year round or as long as the wildlife you wish to attract is about. Purchase native perennials and annuals that are suited to the conditions of your yard. DO NOT use pesticides as these will kill off either the wildlife you are trying to attract or get rid of the food the wildlife needs to eat. Instead use natural means of ridding your yard of pests. Native plants usually do not require fertilizers, herbicides or extra watering except in extreme conditions. Another tip is to reduce the amount of lawn you have. Lawns are not native and are not needed in a backyard habitat. Your wildlife will appreciate leaf mulch, bushes and shrubs instead. You must create an area much like the wildlife would find in the wild. Feeders should be used as a supplement to natural food provided by native plants. If you have a small area to work with you may need to supplement whereas a large area would not require many feeders.
Habitat Plants, Trees, and Shrubs
The following are some plants that can be included in a backyard habitat:
Trees: White Oak, Red Oak, Black Walnut, Hickory, Crabapple, Hawthorn, Pines and Spruces. Shrubs that do well in a backyard habitat are Dogwood, Sumacs, Elderberry, Chokecherry, honeysuckle, and viburnums. Vines that are acceptable are American Bittersweet, Trumpet Creeper, raspberry, and blackberry. Other plants that can be included are sunflowers, black-eyes susans, asters, marigolds, millet, zinnias, and some natural grasses.
Now read about water sources, maintaining your habitat, and other plants that can be used in a backyard habitate.
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