Making a Home for Wildlife

Create a Micro-Environment for Wildlife Wherever You Live

Joe-Pye weed is a high-impact native plant, beloved by many pollinators — including monarch butterflies in search of nectar, as seen here in the Harris Center’s pollinator garden. (photo © Brett Amy Thelen)

As a kid growing up in a series of suburban subdivisions named after the landscapes they’d displaced — Twin Rivers, Crystal Brook, Harmony Farms — I often fantasized about what it would be like to have a “real” house with a “real” yard. If we had lived in an antique farmhouse instead of a brand-new row home, would we find notes from another era tucked between the floorboards? Would our yard have trees big enough to climb, or secret gardens to explore? Even now, contemplating the historic camps that dot the shorelines of many local lakes, I admit that I sometimes get dock envy.

In my twenties and thirties, my attention turned more and more toward wildlife, and as I learned about the many ways landowners can create and sustain wildlife habitat, the nature of my imaginings shifted too. What if I had a field big enough for a kestrel nest box, or an old barn for roosting bats?

Now well into my forties, I’ve come to accept that I may never have access to the 20+ acres kestrels require, or to my very own stretch of shoreline — but I’ve also realized that you don’t need a lot of land to make a difference. Small actions add up, and we can all play a part.

Here are some ways you can help make a home for wildlife, wherever you are…

Create habitat.

When we think about wildlife habitat, we tend to envision secluded mountain streams, boundless woods, or expansive wetlands, but yards, gardens, and even buildings can serve as habitat too, especially for small creatures.

Homegrown National Park (HNP), founded by ecologist Doug Tallamy, is built on the idea that for conservation to succeed, it can’t be limited to conserved land. They advocate for restoring biodiversity one yard at a time, saying: “Start with the space you have. It could be part of your yard you don’t use, a patch of bare ground, or [even] a container on a patio, balcony, or windowsill.”

Once you’ve picked your place, focus on what they call “keystone plants” — native species that support the most caterpillars, which in turn feed the most birds. You can find more detailed recommendations, along with a list of keystone plants tailored to your exact zip code, at homegrownnationalpark.org.

Brush piles like this one provide cover, nesting and denning sites, and perches for songbirds, chipmunks, weasels, and other small animals.
(photo © Dave Anderson).

If tending plants doesn’t spark joy, look to structural habitat instead. Brush piles provide cover, nesting and denning sites, and perches for songbirds, chipmunks, weasels, and other small animals, and are especially useful in places without much natural cover, like the edge of your lawn. This 2022 episode of NHPR’s Something Wild is a good place to start learning more about how brush piles can help create wilderness right in your backyard.

Stacks of punky firewood are the Ritz Carlton for red-backed salamanders, and snakes love stacked stones for sunning and shelter. Shallow bowls of water — dumped and refilled every few days to prevent mosquito larvae from settling in — can provide hydration breaks for birds and bees during summer heat waves. (As the Xerces Center for Insect Conservation says, “If you’re thirsty, they’re thirsty.”)

Bat houses, properly installed, can also serve as important roosting sites. A few years ago, my husband and I attached two bat houses to a south-facing, second-story wall of our garage (pictured, top). Now, dozens of bats stream out of those boxes and proceed to vacuum thousands of mosquitoes out of the twilight skies every summer evening. Bat houses can be tricky to get right, but Bat Conservation International offers some great tips at www.batcon.org/bat-house-guidelines.

Let your yard grow a little wild.

According to Homegrown National Park, leaving leaves where they fall is “the gold standard for biodiversity,” enriching soil and offering overwintering habitat for fireflies, butterflies, salamanders, and more. Songbirds and snakes also forage for caterpillars, slugs, and snails in leaf litter, so leaving leaves can provide natural pest control for your yard and garden. (photo © Brett Amy Thelen)

Over the years, I’ve found that I like the idea of gardening more than the practice itself. As it turns out, laziness is not a bad strategy. Overgrown edges offer cover, shelter, and forage for a variety of animals, and fallen leaves provide vital habitat for overwintering bumblebees, fireflies, butterflies, luna moths, wooly bear caterpillars, red-backed salamanders, and more.

The dried seed heads of asters, goldenrod, and other perennials feed goldfinches throughout the fall and early winter (no store-bought seed required!), and hollow plant stems serve as nesting and overwintering sites for bees, moths, and spiders, who in turn feed warblers and swallows and chickadees and toads.

Of course, the messy edges that support beneficial insects can also harbor ticks, so you may want to preserve some tidy, tick-free habitat for humans in your yard or garden — but even a little laziness can go a long way.

Keep your cats indoors.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that free-ranging domestic cats kill up to four billion birds every year in the United States alone. If you’re thinking, “Not my Fluffy!”, you might want to think again. In a study published in the journal Biological Conservation, scientists put video cameras on 55 free-roaming, suburban cats to track their interactions with wildlife; although 44 percent of the cats successfully hunted wild animals, they only brought 23 percent of their prey items back home. In other words, much of this hunting is happening out of our view.

This very good boy in Harrisville monitors wildlife activity from the safety of the windowsill. (photo © Russ Cobb)

Outdoor cats are also at higher risk for disease, parasites, vehicle strikes, and of course injury or predation by larger animals. The best way to ensure that your cat is not part of the food chain — as predator or prey — is to keep them indoors. If that’s not an option, consider switching to supervised outdoor visits.

Turn off unneeded outdoor lights — and ensure your windows are bird-friendly.

Watching fireflies flicker on a steamy summer night is one of life’s simple pleasures, but these bioluminescent beauties need our help to keep glowing bright. According to the Xerces Society, artificial light is a primary driver of firefly declines, because brighter nights make it difficult for them to communicate with one another through their signature flashes.

In the spring and fall, artificial light can also disorient night-migrating birds, leading to fatal building collisions.

Thankfully, there’s a simple solution: turn off any outdoor lights you’re not using and close your curtains after dark to keep interior light from spilling out into the night. If outdoor lighting is essential for safety or navigation, consider installing timers or motion sensors so you’re only shining a light when it’s needed. You can learn more about the impacts of light pollution — and ways to make your lighting wildlife-friendly — at darksky.org or audubon.org/lights-out.

Bird-friendly window decals are highly effective at preventing window strikes. (photo © Russ Cobb)

Windows can also pose a threat to birds during the daylight hours, when they perceive reflections of trees, landscapes, or sky as actual trees, landscapes, or sky. Because birds tend to hit windows at high rates of speed, these collisions are often fatal. The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to one billion birds die in the United States each year from flying into glass, and the problem is not limited to city skyscrapers.

Breaking up window reflections through the use of screens, decals, or UV paint is highly effective — though it’s important that these treatments be closely spaced and applied to the outside of the glass, where they’re most visible to birds.

Over the years, we’ve been startled by the sickening thump of woodpeckers, warblers, and, once, a ruffed grouse colliding with the upper-story windows on our house, but we haven’t had a single window strike since applying a matrix of barely-visible (to us) UV dots to the most problematic panes. Kudos to the Peterborough Town Library for adding similar decals to the river-facing windows of their new building, as well!

If you want to make the windows of your house, apartment, office, barn, treehouse, studio, man cave, or she-shed better for birds, you can find a treasure trove of options for any budget and aesthetic at abcbirds.org/preventing-collisions.

Steer clear of pesticides – especially rat poison.

If this Broad-winged Hawk could talk, they would  probably say, “Please don’t poison my food.” (photo © Chuck Carlson)

Wildlife rehabilitators across the country are sounding the alarm about second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs) — and for good reason. SGARs, the most common pesticide used in those black plastic bait boxes placed along the bases of many public and private buildings, kill mice and rats by causing catastrophic internal bleeding, but not right away.

SGAR-poisoned rodents can survive for more than a week, and their weakened state makes them easy prey for hawks, owls, foxes, and other predators, who can also be sickened or killed by SGARs as they make their way up the food chain.

Evidence is mounting that the increased use of SGARs is having a serious impact on raptors, fishers, bobcats, and more. Ninety-six percent of all raptors tested at the Tufts Wildlife Clinic were positive for SGARs, including every single red-tailed hawk — 43 in all — tested between 2017 and 2019. In 2023, a first-of-its-kind study detected anticoagulant rodenticides in 44 of 45 fishers collected in Vermont and New Hampshire.

And in the Santa Monica mountains of California, researchers found that 89 percent of 172 bobcat carcasses had been exposed to rodenticides — and that bobcats who had been exposed to SGARs were seven times more likely to die from mange owing to their compromised immune function.

Ironically, these are the very animals who could help us control our rodent problems, if given the chance. A single barn owl can consume up to 1,500 mice a year, and a California study found that installing hunting perches for raptors along agricultural levees not only reduced damage caused by ground squirrels, but also cost less than deploying rodenticides.

Unfortunately, rodent control is a complex issue, and predator-friendly substitutions for SGARs don’t yet exist. However, it is possible to keep rats and mice out of your living spaces the old-fashioned way: by sealing off access points, securing attractants like birdseed, pet food, and trash in rodent-proof containers, and deploying snap traps for the rats that remain.

Your neighborhood owls (and foxes and bobcats and hawks and coyotes and fishers…) will thank you.

Enjoy the everyday wild.

Every once in a while, our wild neighbors present themselves in ways that are impossible to overlook: a barred owl swooping low over the road, or a black bear absconding with a late-spring bird feeder. Most of the time, however, they maintain a subtler presence.

So, if you take steps to make your space more welcoming for wildlife — or even if you don’t — make sure to spend a little time each day looking and listening carefully for your reward. Maybe it’s a garter snake sunning silently on a stone wall, or a hummingbird buzzing the bee balm. Maybe a firefly rising or a chimney swift chittering or the tiniest monarch caterpillar chewing the tiniest hole in the milkweed.

A monarch caterpillar inching its way along a milkweed leaf: one of many rewards for creating backyard wildlife habitat. (photo © Brett Amy Thelen)