A yard can feed and shelter wildlife without becoming a project. These guides cover water, nesting spots, winter cover, and the small habits that make a yard safer for the animals already living there.
In April 2009, dozens of cedar waxwings turned up dead in a yard in Thomas County, Georgia. University of Georgia pathologists examined five of them and found guts distended with nothing but nandina berries, plus bleeding in the lungs and…
A small bird has to get through a long winter night without eating, and its body loses heat faster than a big bird’s does. Where it sleeps matters a lot. A roost box is a birdhouse built for that job.…
A single oak can host hundreds of kinds of caterpillars. A single Bradford pear hosts almost none. Both are “trees.” Only one of them feeds the chickadee on your fence. If you’re going to plant one tree, plant it this…
A bird eats an autumn olive berry, flies off, and drops the seed along your fence line. Repeat that enough times and you’ve got a thicket. That’s the business model for a lot of invasive shrubs and vines. The plant…
A bird can survive a night of subfreezing temperatures, but it still needs water the next morning. That’s a problem when every puddle, birdbath, and shallow stream in the neighborhood has frozen solid. A shallow bowl of fresh water is…
Take the leaves out of a patch of yard and you get almost half as many moths and butterflies by spring. That’s what University of Maryland researchers found when they counted what emerged from one-square-meter plots in 20 suburban yards.…
Before anything else: which sparrow are you dealing with? If the answer is house sparrows, the chunky, aggressive, brown-streaked birds that showed up from England in the 1850s and have been taking over nest boxes ever since, you have real…
Crows eat eggs, nestlings, and given the opportunity, they’ll eat adult birds too, though that’s considerably rarer. If you’ve watched a crow raid a robin’s nest and felt a spike of alarm about the songbirds in your yard, that reaction…
If you grew up catching fireflies in a jar and your kids have seen maybe a handful total, you’re not imagining the difference. Firefly populations have been declining across much of North America and globally, and the causes are well-documented…
Here’s the truth: yes, garter snakes bite. They’d rather not, and they’ll usually flee well before things get to that point, but if you corner one or pick it up, a bite is a real possibility. Here’s what that bite…
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