Create a Backyard Habitat - a Hobby for the Whole Family!

My husband and I wanted to have a beautiful backyard for our children to play and learn about nature. We started by creating a small bird-feeding area outside of our dining room windows so that the kids could easily watch the birds (and squirrles!) eat the food they helped set out for them. When my children were in preschool, they liked to stare out the window and give us updates on the visitors (i.e. "There's a girl cardinal eating birdseed." "There are two gray squirrels eating corn and a black squirrel just came to eat some peanuts!"). Now that they are in elementary school, they are more focused on finding monarch caterpillars, chrysalis, and frogs. Please continue reading this lens to discover how our family hobby has grown!



These photos were taken through a window. Hopefully, I will replace them soon with clearer photos once I learn how to get outside with my camera without scaring away the birds!



Most of the squirrels around our house are gray, but at least one black squirrel comes to our yard to eat sunflower seeds.



For more infromation on how to create your own certified wildlife habitat, go to
www.nwf.org/backyard.

For inspiration, watch "Backyard Habitat" on Animal Planet (check out the show's info at Backyard Habitat), but remember that you can do this on your own without the help of a television crew!

It's been a while since I posted to this lens and our backyard habitat has been growing! My husband continues to buy and plant many native plants and trees. The best native plants to buy are those that reseed themselves, spread over a larger area each season, or can be easily divided to save money on future purchases! Black-eyed Susans are one example of a great native plant that spreads easily here in Maryland - no wonder it is our State Flower! In Spring, it is easy to go to the Black-eyed Susan area in our yard and dig up the new plants (with their roots) for transplanting. We will never need to spend money on Black-eyed Susans again! But don't worry local plant nursery owners - my husband will just use this money to buy other plants!

When we bought our house 8 years ago, we inherited an old purple martin house. Over winter, it started to fall apart, so one summer, we replaced it with a much newer model. It came with a pulley system to make yearly clean-ups much easier. Our timing with the installation was too late for purple martins to set up house, so we were hopeful that the next year we would have new "neighbors" to help take care of our mosquito problems!

To keep you up-to-date, we decided to take down the new purple martin house and donate it to the local arboretum. Between the existing trees and the newly added trees, we realized that the purple martins probably would not like the house (plus the sparrows always seem to find the house first) as they prefer a birdhouse in a wide open area in order to be able to see any predators.

Several summers ago a barn swallow choose to build her nest under the front porch roof. It took me a while to get a photo that showed all four babies at the same time - they were startled everytime we opened the front door. The barn swallows returned for two summers. The next summer the nest was reinforced and its sides were built up a little higher with mud and twigs, but then the barn swallows decided to relocate as our front door opened and closed much more often with our two kids, the two nephews, and the kids from the neighborhood.

I managed to get a photo of the mother barn swallow feeding her baby birds before she realized what I was doing.

Maybe one year the barn swallows will return and build nests in the new nesting boxes my husband and daughter constructed by reusing old wooden window boxes from our house.

For more information on barn swallows and how you can help them with nest-building, please go to Barn Swallows.

In the beginning of our habitat project, we learned that caterpillars like to eat parsley, dill, and lovage - a few of them decided that our herb garden was actually an all-you-can-eat buffet! Since then we have planted milkweed for the monarchs, as well as planting some lovage closer to the flower beds so that maybe the caterpillars would leave the herb garden alone.

For more infromation on what caterpillars eat, go to Host Plants for Caterpillars: Feeding Baby Butterflies.

We have a bluebird house set up in the backyard and one out front. No bluebirds yet, but it can take a few years for bluebirds to locate the new available housing, especially if they have been driven from an area by development.

For basic information on the structure and location requirements for a bluebird house, go to www.shawcreekbirdsupply.com.

Note: In case you were wondering, those 3 green objects around the tree to the left of the birdhouse are sections of a "swim noodle" that I cut to length, split down one side with a knife through to the hollow core, and placed around the wire connecting the new tree to the stakes. I did this before my daughter's birthday party so that a child unfamiliar with our backyard would not get hurt running into a wire.

One weekend, my husband had our 2 kids and 2 nephews help set up 3 rabbit shelters around the yard - 2 in the back corners and 1 out front in the middle of the small tree grove. They placed large logs from the old woodpile in a circle, leaving a "doorway," with more logs strategically placed on top, then added branches and large pieces of bark that came off the logs to create a roof.

My kids couldn't wait to see if any bunnies had moved in yet!

As we were expanding a drainage ditch that we had previously filled with river rocks, we created a frog habitat by using old cinder blocks to create hiding spaces. Pieces of bamboo and large flat rocks were used to create tunnels between the cinder blocks and to keep the smaller river rocks from falling into the spaces.

My husband created another habitat by placing logs and rocks securely under a plastic bin that we already had for outside storage of campfire wood. Since we have already seen at least one snake in this area previously, I am sure that snakes and not frogs will soon be the new homeowners!

Hummingbirds have been coming to our backyard for several years now (but it is difficult to get a photo of them). We have several flowers growing specifically for them, in addition to putting out the sugar-water feeders.