Wildlife habitat

Round about Earth Day we certified our backyard and woods a wildlife habitat with the National Wildlife Federation. The certification is really just a checklist: You check off that your property provides food, water, and cover for wildlife as well as places for animals to raise their young, and that your garden/yard is “green,” give the NWF a little money, and they send you a certificate. For a little more money you get the sign, above. As you can see, the presence of junk in your yard does not disqualify you.

We have about three-quarters of an acre of woods on our property, which, except for cutting a small trail so that we can enjoy them, we’ve left alone, so we have habitat almost by default. The difficult part, I suppose, is that we’ve left it alone, including the part in the middle that gets swampy in spring and breeds mosquitoes, but also the toads that eat them. There are dead trees where woodpeckers and nuthatches nest, and sugarberry and buckthorn trees to provide berries.

But we also minimize lawn space, garden organically, and supplement the natural space with birdfeeders, nestboxes, and a birdbath. We’re trying slowly to replace the landscaping with native perennials. So you could do this on a very small scale, in an urban neighborhood, with no land at all that could be called “natural.” The idea is simply to make your property a home for as many sorts of creatures as possible — to live within nature rather than carving your home out of it — which doesn’t seem too much to ask.