There are a very interesting articles on using snags and other forest débris to help bolster your wildlife.
This is a link to a pdf (I hope).
http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp2.cahnrs.wsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/36/2014/02/SNAGS.pdf
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It may sound bad, but cutting or thinning down a few trees helps. The forest in my yard is mostly composed of beech trees and I am in the process of cutting down everything under a foot in diameter. I’ve cut down a bunch of saplings by hand last winter and there is more sunlight and I’m starting to see more sedges and other woodland plants start growing. Once I cut down everything else I plan on doing a mixture of a wildflower meadow and food plot. Also you’d have no idea how much animals even a tiny wildlife pond without fish can attract.
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definitely true in some ecosystems but not in others. that’s a huge key here. learn your ecosystem and know that actions that work elsewhere may not work for you. Building a pond by digging a hole in a wetland does not help. Planting trees that don’t belong in a prairie does not help. etc, etc.
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Also, some native plants are especially delicious to native insects. I’ve planted spicebushes specifically to attract spicebush swallowtail butterflies, even though the caterpillars are likely to trash the plants.
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There are quite a few brochures on thinning procedures. You can read up on the best practices for your type of woodland if you want. My property is very overgrown, once logged long ago and has way too many trees of varying health. Everything is fighting for sunlight and it could be a huge fire risk.
Our county has a forester who can come out and help work up a forest management plan with us.
Thinning https://catalog.extension.oregonstate.edu/sites/catalog/files/project/pdf/pnw184.pdf
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Welcome to the forum @trickman
Yes, I like this as a beginning framework of providing the basics:
It is making me think that if anyone of those criteria are not correctly met then one will not succeed in the objective of fostering nature. I am curious if there is anything else that would qualify as a a basic for this framework.
But also:
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Your post, @jessm-c , is helpful in that while we can talk about planting and landscaping, we should also think about how we maintain those areas.
I was doing yard work when I came up with the idea of posting this thread. In particular I was cutting plant stalks back to close to the ground that had been previously cut back to about 1 to 2 feet in order to dead head. Rather than mulch and compost these discards, or ship it off to the municipal green waste, I try to find a place in the yard that I can leave a pile of these along with my grape vine trimmings. I have a particular interest in solitary bees and my hopes are that I have left nested habitat for them and possibly other species that might nest in the pith. My thought is (correct or not) I can deal with the discards in the late spring after the hatch.
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Road kill is a useful addition to your garden. Rather than leave it to get mashed up by the traffic and maybe lure a crow or a gull to become more road kill, take it home to be habitat for the beetles and flies that need carrion. There is a size issue here. I’m thinking of rabbits and squirrels rather than deer. You may need to put a cage over it to stop the local cats and foxes taking it.
I don’t plant native species. I prefer to keep a distinction between cultivated plants and wild plants. Studying distributions is a large part of natural history and moving native species around messes up the study. For me, much of the pleasure of the garden is looking what has turned up unaided. I realise there is a grey area here - many of the wild plants that arrive in a garden (= weeds to most people) are foreign species that have been imported by various means. But I would rather live in hope of a wild plant arriving naturally than import it deliberately. As for the service that the plants provide in the forms of nectar and foliage for herbivores, a recent study in UK found closely related garden plants were as good or slightly better than the wild species.
And I’ll put in a good word for lawns. So long as you ignore the peer pressure to have a sward like a pool table, your lawn can be full of wild flowers of the kind that you would find in a closely grazed natural grassland. Just keep removing the mowings to lower the fertility and don’t worry too much about divets - they provide the germination niche for incoming seeds. Some of the best sites in the UK for waxcap fungi (Hygrocybe spp.) are old lawns.
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Mindful weeding and welcome volunteers. I hike weekly in our mountains with a fynbos group, and it’s rewarding to come home to my garden and recognise a volunteer as something I have seen growing wild across the urban edge.
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this also depends on where you are… in the UK, as with here in Vermont, a lawn like that can be pretty low impact, we do have some lawn with lots of different little flowers in it. However, in arid areas such as California, either you have a dead lawn half of the time or more, or you are using water to keep it alive that shouldn’t be used for that.
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As someone mentioned in this forum, many people have only a small yard, and for the vast majority of us our properties are not large enough to satisfy all the home range and foraging needs for most vertebrate species. But one can still foster nature by at least partially providing one or more of the life history requirements that many species have in common. Like water, or nest boxes for cavity nesters. Or food in the form of flowers that provide nectar and pollen, followed by berries or fruit. Cover in evergreen shrubs or in boards or other flat objects on the ground that provide cover for lizards, snakes and a variety of arthropods.
For me, i have a few acres on the edge of town, and my place abuts against larger, several hundred acre parcels, so it is still relatively ‘natural’ in the immediate area of my house. Near the house is an intermittent creek so water for most of the year is provided. But i have planted a few aspen and now have nesting orioles, crabapples that robins and cedar waxwings consume, a lot of native and non-native landscaping plants for pollinators, including milkweed that in some years harbor monarch caterpillars, and have an array of nest boxes so that each spring there are several pairs of tree swallows and couple pairs of western bluebirds nesting in them. The main item on my list for next spring is to plant some additional shrubs to provide more cover for spotted towhees that frequent my yard, but do not nest in it.
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Seems to me that you have a fairly well thought out approach. Do you have mentors for this approach and/or do you mentor or share this approach locally with others?
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i wish there were more groups to discuss this stuff. I found a group that was kind of about this on facebook but it turned into weird rants about leaf blowers (which i agreed with but got sick of because it wasn’t useful information) and fighting about round up, etc
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I have not formally shared it, unless asked for advice. And i haven’t had mentors per se, but i do work as a wildlife biologist, so it’s kind of second nature
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I do think that even small yards and properties can enhance the larger whole of a neighborhood if just a little effort or thought is given to what can be provided in that small area. Which is positive thing to realize for those interested. The National Wildlife Federation used to have a Backyard Habitat program, but not sure if they still do.
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Thanks, i just looked it up. Glad they still offer that type of program. And Monarch Watch has a Monarch Way Station program that also allows a homeowner to certify their property as a way station.
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If your particular interest is in solitary bees, you can help the cavity nesters by erecting beehouses. But definitely do some research into proper solitary bee fostering first, because the cutesy ones you find at generic garden centers often have problems.
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Good article that you linked to @jessm-c and has a shout back to an iNaturalist Project. I have had “bee houses” for close to 20 years or more. I even set myself up a router that uses different sized bits to make different width tracks depending on the species I’m encouraging. I will do a long board with parallel tracks and cut it into certain length trays to insert and stack in a mounted box.
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Another way to help other kinds of solitary bees is to leave some sandy patches in sunny areas if your yard is sandy (which mine is). In fact, the soil in my area is pure sand because it is the shoreline of ancient Lake Iroquois, which sat over the entire Great Lakes area during the last ice age. I have been enriching the soil by becoming a leaf thief, raking all the leaves from the sidewalk and street in my neighbourhood every fall and dumping them in my yard. After 10 years of doing this, last year was the first year I found saprophytic macrofungi in my yard, namely a species of Geaster. (By the time I found them, they were too far gone to identify to species, but next year I’ll keep an eye out for them before they degrade too much to identify!)
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