The month of May is Garden for Wildlife month. Due to factors such as loss of habitat, pesticides exposure, and climate change, much of wildlife is being challenged today. There are many ways home gardeners can directly help birds, bees, butterflies, and other local wildlife. The saying “If you build it, they will come” applies not only to the classic baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” but also to attracting wildlife to your garden.

Plants

If you have the space, plant an oak tree! While it will take several years for the tree to mature, few plants provide more benefits to nature than an oak tree. One Valley oak tree can provide food, water, and shelter to approximately 350 vertebrate species and over 250 species of insects and arachnids.

Plant a variety of native plants which are the foundation of local food webs. Wildlife and plants evolved together in ways that were beneficial to both, plus they are adapted to local soils and weather. Native plants provide food, shelter, and places to care for their young. Native plants also tend to be water-wise, needing little watering once established.

Choose plants that bloom at different times of the year, to ensure something is always blooming during the different seasons thus providing nectar sources year-round.  Include some plants which produce berries to provide food sources attractive to birds and insects.

Create multi-layered planting. Have some canopy trees of different heights, weave in some tall, medium, and small plants, along with some groundcovers. Even a small garden can have plants of different heights to attract and shelter different types of wildlife. Arbors and trellises are also ways to grow vines, providing more variety in your garden.

Lawns lack variety, thus reducing your lawn space and replacing it with native plants will increase the diversity in your garden. Decreasing the frequency of mowing permits grasses to grow taller, allowing flowers to grow and bloom which would attract bees and butterflies. You can also sprinkle some daisy and clover seeds into your lawn to provide forage plants and flowers for many beneficial insects.

Water

Wildlife needs water. The water source(s) can be a small dish, a bird bath, a rain garden, or pond. Water in bird baths needs to be shallow since birds will not use a bath where the water is deeper than their legs. Be sure to clean and change the water frequently to prevent mosquitoes.

Ponds with aquatic-loving plants can encourage amphibians such as salamanders or toads, or wetland insects such as dragonflies, to visit and set up their homes.

Butterflies engage in behavior called “puddling,” where they stop in muddy puddles for water and nutrients. You can recreate this by filling a terra cotta saucer with soil and pebbles, sink it into the ground and keep it moist. Again, change the water regularly.

Plants and rocks around the water source(s) provide shelter, camouflage, and spots for creatures like butterflies, lizards, or turtles who like to sun themselves near water.

Housing for Bees

Most bees are solitary in nature with 70% being ground nesters like mining bees. Cavity-nesters such as mason bees comprise 30% of bees. These live in twigs, abandoned beetle holes, and other tree cavities. The social honeybees and bumble bees who live in hives or colonies make up less than 1% of all bees. Native bees are up to 200 times more efficient pollinators than honeybees. You can attract native bees to your garden by providing bare patches of dirt in out-of-the way sections and/or supply bee housing with hollow reeds or cardboard tubes in a sheltered spot that receives morning sun.

Leave the Leaves

Leaving leaves as they drop from your trees and bushes provides food and shelter for a variety of living creatures including worms, beetles, millipedes, larvae of some butterflies and moths, toads, frogs and more. These in turn attract birds, mammals, and amphibians that rely on the smaller organisms as a food source.

Chemicals

Reduce or eliminate use of pesticides and fertilizers which can be harmful to wildlife (including beneficial insects) and contaminate water resources. Instead use earth-friendly solutions such as garden mulch to discourage weeds and adding nutrients to the soil. UC Integrated Pest Management provides a source of research-based less-toxic solutions for garden pest management.

One Step at a Time

Changing your garden into a wildlife haven will likely be a step-by-step process over a period of time. Building a garden attractive to wildlife will bring you the enjoyment of watching them and the knowledge you are helping wildlife thrive.

Resources listed provide information for ways to you to build a garden attractive to wildlife.

• Butterflies in Your Garden: https://ucanr.edu/sites/CEStanislausCo/files/345791.pdf
• Sustainable Landscaping: https://ucanr.edu/sites/stancountymg/Sustainable_Landscaping/
• Trees in Your Garden:  https://ucanr.edu/sites/CEStanislausCo/files/341553.pdf
• Pollinator-Friendly Native Plants Lists: https://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/pollinator-friendly-plant-lists
• UC IPM Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program: http://ipm.ucanr.edu/
• The Bee Gardener: The Cavities You Want to Have: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=12785
• How to Make and Use Bee Houses for Cavity Nesting Bees: https://beegarden.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-to-build-and-use-bee-blocks.pdf

 

Denise Godbout-Avant has been a Stanislaus County Master Gardener since 2020.

Every year, Pollinator Partnership celebrates National Pollinator Week, which helps spread the word about pollinators and how to protect them. Our local UCCE Stanislaus County Master Gardeners have given quite a few classes on this subject, including how to identify pollinators, what native bee pollinators to look for in your garden, butterfly pollinators, and which plants pollinators prefer.

Native (Bee) Pollinators 

Take a quiz on your knowledge of native bee pollinators, learn about the three types of pollinator nesting, and see examples of what types of plants pollinators prefer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOGDSNJJoh8&t=6s 

Planting for Pollinators

Learn about the local native bee pollinators and hummingbirds you might see in your backyard, and what kind of plants they prefer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naL3BM5aP-s&t=5s

Butterflies in Your Garden

Find out how to have more butterflies in your garden, by learning which plants are required for butterflies to complete their lifecycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHXSdtxicII&t=6s 

Follow Along

Download the handouts from any of our classes by visiting our Classes and Workshops web page at https://ucanr.edu/sites/stancountymg/Classes/ 

This post was originally published on June 24, 2021.

Ready to learn more about pollinators? If you took our Virtual Native Pollinators class, you learned about the local native bee pollinators and hummingbirds you might see in your backyard, and what kind of plants they prefer.

Planting for Pollinators will focus on native and compatible non-native plants that thrive in our area, and which pollinators have been documented visiting these plants. 

It can sometimes be hard to spot these pollinators, so our speaker will tell us what time of year to look for them, and which plants to use to attract them.

Our speaker has many years of experience planting native plants and observing the pollinators that visit. She will combine her observations with research on what insects to expect on specific plants.

Watch our YouTube Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naL3BM5aP-s&t=5s

About the speaker:
Ellen is a professional Horticulturist specializing in beautiful, heat tolerant, reduced-irrigation plantings that thrive in landscapes in the Central Valley of California. Most recently she has been exploring her passion for Pollinator Gardening and how it can contribute to biological diversity in urban and suburban California landscapes. 

Recently retired from the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, she loves plant identification, the outdoors, wildflowers, travel and sharing her knowledge through education programs about horticulture and more sustainable landscapes. Also, she's always happy to speak Latin when discussing a plant!

Honey bees get a lot of press, but they aren't the only pollinators in our gardens and landscapes. California is home to over 1600 species of native bees, and many can be found in your backyard. In addition to native bees, there are also butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, and other pollinators.

I'm excited to announce that we've partnered with Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Xerces Society to bring a class all about pollinators! 

You can sign up for our event at http://ucanr.edu/pollinators/2019 It's being held Thursday, September 5, 2019 from 6:00-7:30 p.m. in Harvest Hall Rooms D&E at the Stanislaus County Agricultural Center.

Please join us for a fun evening of learning about native pollinators, the plants and habitats they prefer, and the best way to “invite” them to your landscape! Free wildflower seed packets for participants while they last.

We are asking for a voluntary payment of $2 per person to help pay speaker mileage fees.

Resources
Beyond the honey bee: Learn more about California native bees. UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. Taken from https://arboretum.ucdavis.edu/blog/beyond-honey-bee-learn-more-about-california-native-bees on August 21, 2019.