Wildlife

Before taking your Christmas tree to the recycling center this year, consider using it to create backyard habitat for birds. To attract birds, you must provide their three basic needs - food, water, and cover or shelter. Your old Christmas tree will provide excellent shelter for birds, providing protection from wind and predators. It can also serve as a feeding station, where you provide a buffet of food that our native birds love. 

Many long-time gardeners enjoy inviting birds to their backyards. Birdwatching is entertaining, educational and relatively inexpensive. Setting out bird feeders is a great way to get started, but it's even better to improve their natural habitat in your landscape.

Often, allowing our landscapes to be a little less tidy is a great way to improve bird habitat. Check out these five strategies from the National Garden Bureau for improving your landscape’s habitat value for birds.

Failure to protect fruit trees and landscape ornamentals against gnawing rodents, rabbits and deer this fall can result in a nasty surprise next spring: girdled trunks or stems, and broken branches. Late fall is the time to get protection in place and safeguard the health of your plants. Prevention is the only way to protect trees and shrubs from injury since very little can be done to salvage plants once the damage is done.

Want to stay active outdoors, even after the gardening season ends? Then consider becoming a community scientist and joining National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC). It’s the longest running community citizen science project in the United States.

Wildlife damage on woody landscape plants is very common, particularly in winter when cold weather and declining food resources make our landscape plants look pretty tasty! Common culprits include rabbits, voles and deer.

Today, we’re going to focus on preventing deer damage, but for more information on minimizing the impact of rabbits and voles, check out “4 Fall Season Tips for Living with Wildlife”.

For better or worse, another gardening season is over. This week, we could talk about reviewing your gardening year, selecting disease resistant cultivars, proper pruning, watering or mulching techniques, or keeping garden records of success or failures so next year’s growing season goes better.

Moving from late fall into winter is a transition period for wildlife. Colder weather and declining food sources make damage to landscape plants and wildlife moving into our homes a significant possibility. Below are tips to help make the transition smoother for both wildlife and us, including tips for enjoying birds at your feeders this winter.

Spring fever is upon us! These warm, sunny days are just so wonderful, it makes any gardener want to get out in their garden and landscape. But with concerns about bees, other pollinators and beneficial insects at the forefront of many gardener’s minds, it’s important to understand what you can do now – before you clean up the spring garden – to maintain and create good insect habitat. Insects over winter in a variety of ways, but these can be broadly grouped as 1) protected in the soil, 2) within leaf litter or other vegetation and 3) above ground on vegetation or other surfaces.

Supplies:

• large pinecones
• cotton string
• peanut butter
• bird seed
• spoon

Directions:

Tie 8-inch string around pinecone and then make a loop so you can hang the pinecone feeder on the tree.

With a spoon, scoop and press the peanut butter on the pinecone, carefully pushing the peanut butter under the pinecone scales.

Roll the peanut butter pinecone in birdseed.

Hang the pinecone birdseed feeder on a tree.

Gardening activity for children, kids and youth.

As you give your vegetable garden a final fall cleanup this year, consider leaving some plant residues for wildlife and some plant stubble for pollinators.