Helping Wildlife – Preserve Wildlife Habitat
Eye Help Animals Willdlife Eyes Panamanian Golden Frog
In a list of some of the top ways we can help wildlife, a really important one has to do with land ownership. Where we live, we have about 27 acres of land. Of course, a couple are designated for our home and garden area. But the majority of our land is wild with trees and shrubs that the wildlife seems to appreciate. We have nesting birds in our trees as well as in the nesting boxes we provide.
Our first year in our home we spent about 10 hours mowing the land that was part of the “lawn”. After that first year, since I was doing the majority of the mowing, I decided I was no longer going to mow a large tract of the land, which narrowed the mowing time to about 5 hours. And now after 14 years, we hire a young boy in our town to earn a little money when he mows the land we still consider to be lawn. But even that is narrowing as we fill even more of the land with raspberry and blueberry bushes and other flowering bushes to help attract birds and butterflies.
Even a dead tree can provide year-round shelter for a variety of wildlife, from squirrels to several species of birds. They also often feast on the wood-eating insects that infest the tree trunks and branches. We even have a pond on our land, periodically maintained by beavers (we suspect someone is illegally trapping them on our land but we have not caught anyone yet) that is an important breeding habitat for frogs, salamanders, and newts. And sometimes we have a special treat when a Great Blue Heron drops by to fish in the pond.