Welcoming Wildlife – Article by: Jessica Warren, ANR Agent Camden County
There are not many topics that cause more polarized feelings in the landscape than our wild neighbors and co-habitants – folks either love them or hate them. Wildlife offer a living classroom for both children and adults, and watching them can be a down right entertaining family pastime. Wildlife are critical to the balance of the ecosystem that we also depend upon, and have as much or more right to be here as we continually encroach on and develop their homes. We’ll briefly discuss how to encourage wildlife in your landscape, but also how to avoid negative interactions with wildlife.
If you’re inviting wildlife into your landscape you’ll want to provide the things they need for survival – food, water, shelter, space, and safety from harmful human intervention. Native plants provide the best food (and sometimes shelter) for native wildlife and insects (remember your pollinators are insects). Native plants provide food through their fruits, seeds, leaves, nectar, and pollen. It’s best to plant a variety of different shapes, sizes, structures, colors, and bloom times for best habitat. Our native wild insects and other animals co-evolved and adapted to our native plant species over thousands of years and many of these species can only forage or complete their lifecycles on one species of native plant. This is true of most caterpillars. Though you may not always like to caterpillars chomping your leaves, most folks like to see butterflies (which many caterpillars become) and birds. A single nest of songbirds needs roughly 3000-4000 caterpillars to successfully raise one clutch of baby birds. This is one of the many reasons that it’s important to let insects live and not treat with insecticides without good reason. Insects are the base of the food chain. Without them, we’ll all go hungry. It’s important not to feed wildlife other than songbirds and to clean feeders regularly (about once a week is ideal) with a 10% bleach solution to reduce the spread of disease. Hummingbird feeders should be changed and sanitized daily in our hot weather to prevent hummingbird kills from bacterial and fungal pathogens. You should never hand feed any wildlife as this is dangerous and potentially lethal for the animal and yourself. And if you’re feeding ducks, never feed them bread. It will leave them full but malnourished and often spread disease. Corn, grapes, and oats are better choices, though it’s best not to feed waterfowl at all.
Water is an easier topic to address. Water can be supplied for wild animals and insects through a variety of means including birdbaths, puddles, an old plate or shallow dish, plants with cupped leaves, and rocks or pavers with depressions. A combination of deeper and shallower sources is best in order to provide for both ample sized and tiny visitors. You can accomplish this easily by adding a rock to one part of your birdbath. Change the water every day or two to draw in more visitors, reduce the spread of disease, and prevent mosquito issues. Manmade water sources such as birdbaths and saucers should be sanitized weekly with a 10% bleach solution.
Shelter can be one of the easiest habitat resources to provide – especially since it falls into the set it and forget it category. Leaf piles, mulch, stick or log piles, rock piles, diverse vegetation, and bird and bat houses can all provide good shelter. Decaying logs provide both shelter and warmth to overwintering pollinators and other small creatures. As the logs decay they release heat. Snags are amazing habitat for a huge diversity of creatures if you can safely leave them in place. Snags are dead trees that are still standing. Of course, this is only recommended if they are in a location where they don’t pose a risk to life, limb, or investment. Leaving palm fronds unpruned and Spanish moss untouched is also important. Many of our native bat species (who are amazing mosquito control) need old hanging palm fronds and Spanish moss to roost in. These species will not utilize bat houses. Vertical structure in your plantings is also a good shelter source. Vertical structure refers to planting plants of different heights and growing habits such as a combination of ground covers, herbaceous flowers, shrubs, and small and large trees. The more diversity that there is in your landscape, the more diversity it will support in your wildlife.
Whether in your landscape or in the wild, it is important to give wildlife space. Wild animals are naturally afraid of humans and see us as a predator. Close or forced encounters can trigger stress in the animal, defensive behaviors, injury for both parties, or capture myopathy (death of a wild animal due to handling – caused by stress and shock).
Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do. Do not use sticky traps, plastic bird netting, poison, or moth balls in or around your home. Sticky traps kill birds, bats, lizards, snakes, butterflies – literally anything that crosses it. Animals often rip their skin off in an effort to escape, and will chew through their own legs and other body parts to get free. Even if you catch what you intended – this is cruel as victims slowly starve or bleed to death in contorted positions.
Plastic netting is often used with the best of intentions, but often has unintended and lethal consequences. Netting can trap, entangle, and sever snakes and other wildlife. If you’re a snake lover (or just someone with empathy), this is heartbreaking. If you don’t like or are scared of snakes, you probably don’t want to deal with trying to free them or cut them out of your netting – whether they’re alive or dead. This entanglement can happen both in the garden or in trees, and is cruel, messy, and destructive.
Poison has no place in your home or landscape, and quite frankly, I’m not sure why it’s still available for such uses. Poison is a slow, cruel, and inhumane way for anything to die. Cats, owls, hawks, eagles, foxes, and other predatory animals die from eating prey that has ingested poison. Non-target species such as pets can also accidentally ingest the poison and die. If that’s not enough motivation to avoid poisons, keep in mind that animals that ingest poison often go somewhere they feel secure to die. Places such as your walls or air ducts. There’s no smell quite as memorable and long lasting as that of a decaying rodent in a place that you can’t get to.
Moth balls are a registered insecticide and it is illegal to use them in any way that is not directed on the label. The only appropriate use for them is to put in your closet to keep moths out of your wool clothes. Since hardly anyone has any wool clothes anymore, it’s unlikely that there’s ever a valid reason for you to purchase moth balls. They do not repel any type of wildlife though they are highly toxic to most species including you. Using them outside is illegal and extremely dangerous.
One of the most important things that you can do if you care about any type of wildlife is to keep cats indoors. Domestic cats have contributed to the extinction of 33 species. In North America, domestic cats are a non-native, invasive species that wreaks havoc on native wildlife causing severe ecological disruption and degradation. Cats not only kill birds (2.4 billion per year in the contiguous United States to be exact) but also significantly impact other wildlife populations such as bats and other small mammals (12.3 billion mammals per year), as well as reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Even when cats do not directly predate wildlife, their presence leads to indirect mortality through the reduced feeding of young birds and the spread of Toxoplasma gondii to wildlife. Outdoor cats carry and spread more diseases to humans than cats that are strictly indoors (including rabies and toxoplasmosis which can cause seizures, blindness, mental disabilities, etc.) and have shorter lifespans. If you love your cat, keep it inside and only take it outside on a leash. Yes, cats can be leash trained and many states and countries have leash laws for cats like they do for dogs. It will also improve neighbor relations when your cat stops using your neighbor’s garden as a litter box and scratching their car.