French author Albert Camus tells us, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” And what opulent bouquets the leaves of autumn do create—whole mountainsides of dazzling color. But nature has a way of combining the sublime with the practical, and the fiery reds, yellows and oranges of autumn trees stand out as an excellent example of this convergence.

Why Falling Leaves?

As winter descends, trees in temperate and boreal zones face punishingly cold temperatures and frigid winds, conditions that would damage leaves, so trees have to reduce themselves to their toughest parts—stems, trunks, branches, bark. Leaves must fall.

Evergreens can hang on to their leaves through winter, because their foliage is coated in a wax that helps protect against cold, and their cells bear anti-freeze chemicals that ward off winter’s worst woes. Not so for broadleaf, or deciduous, trees. The fluids that flow through their leaves are thin and susceptible to freezing, the tissues tender. Winter cold dooms the leaves, and trees save energy by getting rid of them. Let’s take a look at the process.

As the dark mantle of winter’s dwindling days falls, trees can sense the loss of light.  Thanks to chemical light receptors—phytochrome, which detects red light, and cryptochrome, which is sensitive to blue—trees can register day-length changes of as little as half an hour. When they do, they undergo chemical and physical changes that produce autumn hues.

How Pigments Play a Part

It’s all about chlorophyll—the green pigment that allows plants to absorb sunlight and turn it into food that can be stored for winter dormancy, much as a bear stores fat for hibernation. During the growing season, trees create chlorophyll as fast as they use it up, so leaves stay green. But as daylight declines, trees slow the production of chlorophyll until, finally, it stops. Producing more would be a waste of energy because, as temperatures near the freezing point, the process of photosynthesis slows to impractical levels.

While the green pigment ebbs from the leaf, other pigments hidden in the greenery during warm months begin to appear. Carotenoids—which produce the yellow, orange and brown colors in the flowers of daffodils and the roots of carrots, in the rinds of pumpkins and the peels of bananas—are present in leaf cells throughout the growing season, but they’re masked by the green pigment. Once the chlorophyll disappears, the carotenoids give leaves a burst of color.

Trees produce another pigment group, the anthocyanins, primarily in autumn. These pigments give red and purple to such things as blueberries, cherries, red apples, concord grapes, and plums. And autumn leaves. Possibly, their presence helps to lower the leaf’s freezing point, giving it some protection from cold and allowing leaves to remain in place longer, giving trees more time to absorb nutrients.

You can tell by the color of an autumn leaf what kind of pigment a tree specializes in. Oaks, dogwoods, black tupelo and some maplestend to turn red, brown or russet because they produce a lot of anthocyanins.  Hickories, aspensand some maples (the most erratic of fall trees, obviously), are big on carotenoids, leading to the trees’ brilliant golds and yellows.

The precise timing of the color shift apparently is genetically controlled. Oaks, for example, are among the last trees to change color. Others, such as sourwood, flip the switch to fall colors as early as August. However, weather and soil moisture can affect the quality of fall color. A severe summer drought can delay fall color by a few weeks. A warm spell in autumn also tones down autumn colors.

Best Weather for Colorful Falls

The most-dazzling displays of scarlet and crimson occur in autumns marked by warm, bright days and cool, crisp nights with temperatures above freezing. Sun-lit autumn days stimulate leaves to produce sugars, and chill nights close the veins leading into and out of the leaf, locking in the sugars—which in turn lead to the production of anthocyanins and their crimsons and violets. Yellow and gold colors vary little from year to year, however, because leaves contain carotenoids at all times.

Losing Leaves

Eventually, autumn leaves must fall. By the end of summer, they may be damaged by insects, disease or general wear and tear and ready for renewal. They are equipped to self-destruct. At the point where leaf stem meets twig or branch is an array of cells called the abscission layer. As autumn days shorten, this layer begins to choke off the veins that move water into the leaf and food into the tree. Once the leaf is completely choked off, the layer becomes dry and flakey and, through decomposition, detaches the leaf from the tree.

The Autumn Gardener

Nature seems to abhor waste, so it is no surprise that though leaves may fall to earth, they still have not outlasted their ecological role. As they decompose, their nutrients trickle into the soil and feed future generations of plant and animal life. Quite likely, fallen leaves are a key factor in the survival not only of trees, but of forests as a whole.

This means that you need not militantly rake up every fallen leaf. In fact, leaving them on the ground is actually a very good thing to do for wildlife.

With their leaves gone, the trees are ready to take on winter’s slings and arrows. Naturalist Henry David Thoreau imagined it this way in his journal entry for October 29, 1858: “Nature now, like an athlete, begins to strip herself in earnest for her contest with her great antagonist Winter. In the bare trees and twigs what a display of muscle.”

That display of botanical muscle might still need a bit of help from the gardener.  Water trees and shrubs through autumn, so they can begin winter with a head start on moisture. Even in winter, trees, especially young ones, can benefit from watering every three or four weeks when temperatures are above freezing. Dousing them early in the day gives them more time to absorb the water before night freezes the soil. As cold weather begins, wrap tree trunks with crepe-paper tree wrap or burlap until spring to prevent sun scald, which occurs when sunlight on a subfreezing day warms a tree trunk to as much as 40 some degrees above freezing, allowing ice to form in the tree cells during night cold and producing dead tissues that in spring will crack open.

Be a Wildlife Gardener

Help wildlife in your neighborhood by becoming a wildlife gardener.

Garden for Wildlife!

The opossum is one of the most frequently encountered U.S. wildlife species, showing up in woods and swamps, plains and marshes, cities and suburbs—and in backyard gardens, where it may play some important roles in controlling garden pests and even in limiting ticks.

It may look like a big, grayish-white rat, but truly the opossum is something special in the realm of North American wildlife. Its ancestors can be traced back roughly 65 million years, to physically similar animals that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs and probably fed on dinosaur eggs. Any creature that lasts that long with the same body plan is doing something right. The only U.S. marsupial, the Virginia opossum—named after the region in which Europeans first encountered it—has endured because its behavior is highly flexible—it can eat almost anything and find shelter almost anywhere.

Here are a dozen highlights you may enjoy about this neighborly species, which shares with you the habitat it has lived in for hundreds of thousands of years:

1. The Virginia opossum is about the size of a house cat (making it the largest of the Western Hemisphere’s 100-plus opossum species), with a naked, scaly tail; a long, pointed face; a pink or reddish button nose; and leathery, rounded ears like the leaves of a geranium.
2. The opossum gives birth to bumble-bee-sized young in an almost embryonic stage of development but capable of crawling along the mother’s body to her pouch, a characteristic of all marsupials, from kangaroos to wombats. In the pouch, each young latches on to one of thirteen teats, remaining attached until ready to leave the pouch in about 11 weeks. As they mature, the young continue clinging to the mother’s hair and using her for transportation.
   

   

3. The opossum’s tail is prehensile, meaning it can wrap around and hold on to tree limbs, an aid in climbing. Young ones may hang by their tails, but adults are too heavy to do so.
4. Virginia opossums show more variation in size than almost any other mammal. Adult males can measure about 1 to 3 feet long from the tip of the nose to the base of the tail and weigh 1.5 to 14 pounds. Ranging from southern Canada down into Costa Rica, they reach their largest size in the north.
5.  The name “opossum” is derived from an Algonquian word meaning “white animal.”
6. Opossums are unusually resistant to snake venom. The bites of rattlesnakes and similar vipers usually aren’t fatal or even harmful to them.
7. Unlike skunks and raccoons, opossums are not prone to rabies infections.
8. Virginia opossums eat almost anything, from bird eggs to acorns, from slugs and frogs to fruit.
9. As is typical for marsupials, opossums possess a rudimentary brain, about a fifth the size of a raccoon’s.
10. Adult opossums are solitary and nocturnal—active at night—and generally live in burrows and cavities that they find ready-made rather than create themselves. They seek shelter underground, in trees or anywhere in between.
11. When frightened or harmed, opossums go into a sort of torpor, lying still as death—the famous act of “playing ’possum.” But they are not exactly playing. They have no control over this response, which could be said to paralyze them with fear. Their lips draw back, revealing their teeth in a sardonic grin, and anal glands spew a foul-smelling fluid that deters potential predators.  If left unharmed, a catatonic opossum will recover in roughly one to four hours.  Younger opossums are less likely than mature individuals to play ’possum, but even older animals can’t be relied on always to collapse in a confrontation—they may growl, bite or, most typically, flee—at a top speed of perhaps 7 miles per hour. Almost any predator can outrun them, which may be why playing ’possum evolved as a defense.
12. Opossum meat was historically a favored food in the Deep South, and ’possum grease was used in traditional medicine as a chest rub for respiratory ailments.

Opossums and Gardening

As omnivores, opossums will police your garden, feeding on insect pests, garden slugs, rodents, toads, snakes and even dead animals that might otherwise rot in place. They may pose an occasional threat to garden fruits and vegetables, but they tend to prefer plant matter that is starting to rot, so chances are they will help clean up, rather than clean out, your garden. If a ’possum does take up residence in your yard and dine on plants you consider off limits, you can use the following measures to stop it:

• If an opossum dens under your house or other structures, block its entryway with wadded newspaper during the day, when the animal is sure to be inside. After sundown, check to see if it has pushed out the paper—if so, you know it is no longer inside, and you can cover the entrance with wire mesh or some other material that will block the animal. Another way to be sure the ’possum is away is to put a layer of flour along the ground outside the entrance, then look for footprints after dark.
• You can try several sprays that discourage opossums. Squirt some liquid soap into a quart of water and then add a cup of molasses or hot sauces and chopped hot peppers or mustard, and spray plants with one of these concoctions. The taste will drive away opossums. The hot stuff also will discourage squirrels.
• Some sources recommend putting moth balls into cavities and around plants from which you want to discourage opossums, but moth balls are toxic, so you should avoid this approach.
• Another suggestion is to put towels into a coffee can with holes punched through it. Saturate the towels with ammonia, put on the plastic lid and situate the can in a place from which you wish to banish opossums. Of course, given the aroma of ammonia, you might find yourself avoiding the area, too.

But in all, opossums are creatures with which you can probably live and let live—they come out after dark, so you may never see them, and they’ll run from you if you do; they eat pests; and they don’t carry rabies. They really are great wildlife neighbors!

Ants: What They Are

• They’ve given rise to more than 20,000 species, indicating great plasticity in the game of survival;
• They thrive in land environments all over the globe, with the exception of Antarctica and some islands, a sign of demonstrative adaptability; and
• They are numerous, indicating that they can have a marked effect on their habitat; Harvard University biologist and ant expert E.O. Wilson has estimated that the world’s living ants number between 1 quadrillion and 10 quadrillion (which is to say, between 1 with fifteen zeros and one with 16 zeros) and that all the ants in the world taken together weigh as much as all the people.

The Lives of Ants

Ants live in groups ranging from a few dozen that reside in natural cavities to sprawling colonies composed of millions. The ant species you’re likely to encounter in your backyard favor large colonies.
Breeding and social behaviors vary dramatically among species, but backyard ants, divided loosely into red and black species, fit a pattern that goes something like this:

1. During the annual breeding season, newly mature, winged females and males take flight, leaving their home colony.
2. Males usually find a convenient perch on which to gather and emit a scent that attracts females, each of which, depending on species, will mate with one to a dzoen or more males.
3. Each female then flies off in search of a suitable place to establish her colony. Once satisfied that she has found such a site, the female breaks off her wings (quite a metaphor for sacrificing one’s freedom on behalf of the next generation), digs in and begins laying the eggs that will produce the workers that will build the colony.

Ant Colonies

Having been raised by the female, her first descendants get to work enlarging the nest, locating and bringing in food, and caring for the eggs that the female, which we generally call a queen, continues to lay (Note: some colonies have only one queen, some several, and some none, with eggs laid by breeding female workers).

As a queen reproduces, a colony can grow to millions of ants, most of them sterile, wingless females belonging to different castes, such as workers that remove dead ants from the nest and soldiers that defend the colony.

Workers generally live for one to three years, but colonies can last for as much as 30 years. Queens may last equally long. Males, whose lives consist of eating and breeding, don’t really have it as good as it sounds—they live for only a few weeks.

A Worker’s Life

Like a maid in waiting, a young worker devotes its early life to tending the queen and her young. As she matures, the worker turns to such tasks as excavation and going outside the nest to find food.

Tending eggs and young is a full-time job. Eggs develop best when kept at controlled temperatures within the nest, so workers move eggs around as needed to stay within proper parameters. After hatching, the larvae are helpless. Workers feed them with a liquid they disgorge as well as with bits of plant and animal matter. Some ants capture and store prey in the nest and carry the larvae to the victims for feeding. In some species, the type of food the larvae receive determines whether they will grow up to be queens or workers.

Older workers forage for food outside the nest. Leaving the nest can be dangerous, which is probably why older ants do the foraging—they aren’t going to last much longer, so losing them to a bird, toad or other predator isn’t as critical as losing a vibrant, young worker.

Making Scents of Ants

When foragers find a good food source, they leave a trail of scent as they return to the nest. Other ants can follow the scent to the food. Scent plays other roles in ant life. Queens emit a scent that causes workers to feed larvae in a way that creates more workers. If a queen stops producing this scent, the workers will begin preparing larvae in a way that creates new queens. In some ants, if an individual is crushed, it releases an odor that puts other ants in attack mode.

Ant attacks can be painful. Some species have venomous bites and some bear stingers. The bullet ant of Latin America has the most painful sting of any known insect.

Ants as Farmers and Ranchers

Although most ants are hunters or scavengers, some are farmers or ranchers. Latin American leafcutter ants, for example, collect leaves that they store in their colonies and use as fodder for growing a fungus that is the ants’ exclusive food. Other ant species bring insects, such as aphids or certain types of butterfly caterpillars, into the nest, where they care for and feed the captives. In turn, the ants eat secretions produced by their “livestock.” Some ants “herd” caterpillars in and out of the nest, taking them daily to “pastures” where the livestock can feed, then returning them to the nest.

Ants, Plants and Gardeners

Ants help natural plant communities to survive by feeding on plant pests and by carrying seeds through forests and grasslands, helping to disperse an estimated 3,000 plant species, including trilliums, violas, corydalis, bleeding heart, trout lilies and most violets.

Some plants coordinate flowering and fruiting with periods of peak ant activity, taking full advantage of the insects, and some produce seeds rich in fats that attract the ants, which bring the seeds into their nests. The ants feed the fat to larvae and discard the rest of the seed, allowing it to grow in the enriched soil of an anthill waste dump.

Ants help protect many garden plants. For example, peony blooms secrete a sweet fluid that attracts ants, which feed on the substance and protect the flowers from other insects.

Ants also serve as food themselves, eaten by predatory insects, spiders, frogs, lizards and birds, among other creatures. They constitute a large part of the diet of some North American bear species.

In North American backyards, ants may create aphid sanctuaries, protecting the aphids living on an individual tree or other plant and moving the aphids among various feeding sites. The ant’s habit of protecting aphids may not endear them to gardeners trying to free roses or other plants of the sap-sucking insects, but attempts to destroy ant colonies are usually counterproductive. When a nest is destroyed, the ground is simply cleared for invasion by another queen, and there are always going to be other queens in the offing. To keep ants from maintaining aphid herds on shrubs and trees, try painting stems and trunks with a sticky fluid or wrapping the bases of the plants with a sticky-surfaced tape.

Want to make the most out of gardening, and help wildlife (even ants!)? Become a wildlife gardener with the National Wildlife Federation. It’s free and you’ll get great wildlife gardening tips and learn how to certify your yard as an official habitat.

One: The Destructive Extraction Process

The oil industry extracts oil from tar sands within 250 feet of the surface through strip mining, tearing away the soil after clear-cutting forests and removing other vegetation. Drilling and the injection of high-pressure steam are used to reach deeper layers.

The extraction process is energy and water intensive. By 2007, Alberta’s tar sands operations were permitted to remove enough water from nearby rivers to meet the needs of a city of 3 million people. Water removal is projected to increase by at least 50 percent as additional projects become operational.

Most of the water comes from the Athabasca River—as much as 15 percent of the river’s weekly flow can be taken legally—causing concerns that low-flow periods will increase mortality of fish and other aquatic organisms that are a source of food for birds. As mining operations change regional wetlands, rivers and underground reservoirs, they threaten hundreds of thousands of birds dependent on these wetlands and waterways.

Two: Threats to Bird Habitat

Tar sands operations destroy wildlife habitat by mining and by the creation of vast tailings ponds, as well as through fragmentation of mature forests by infrastructure for oil exploration, drilling, transport and processing. Some facts:

• At least 89 tar sands drilling projects and six mines punctuate northeastern Alberta.
• Strip mining of more than 1 million acres in Alberta’s boreal forests has resulted in the loss of breeding habitat for millions of birds.
• Studies have found no evidence that strip-mined areas can be restored.

Three: Threats to Birds

The boreal forest of northeastern Alberta is an important breeding area for nearly 300 bird species, at least 130 of which use the tar sands area. One square mile of forest in northeastern Alberta can support as many as 500 breeding pairs of migratory birds, some of the highest densities anywhere in Canada’s boreal forest. As many as 170 million birds breed yearly in the tar sands area. A recent study estimated that tar sands operations have caused the loss of as many as 402,000 birds. Some facts:

• Water and solids removed during tar sands processing are sent to vast tailings ponds that are some of the largest human-made structures on Earth, covering more than 65 square miles—an area about the size of Washington, D.C.
• Mistaking tailings ponds for natural ponds, waterfowl and shorebirds land in them and become oiled with waste bitumen and toxic elements. Up to 90 percent of oiled birds drown or die from hypothermia when their oiled feathers lose the ability to insulate. Birds also can absorb tar sands toxins through inhalation, ingestion and skin contact.
• At least nine bird species found in the tar sands region have lost more than half their population during the past 50 years, including the horned grebe, lesser yellowleg, short-billed dowitcher, boreal chickadee, olive-sided flycatcher, evening grosbeak, lesser scaup, greater scaup and northern pintail.
• The lesser scaup, the population of which has declined as much as 70 percent in the past 30 years, is a widely reported casualty of tailings ponds.

Four: Tar Sands and Climate Change

Tar sands oil production emits three times more global warming pollution per barrel than does conventional oil due to the large amounts of energy needed for processing. Carbon pollution from Canadian oil sands are expected to reach 108 megatonnes by 2020—a fifth of Canada’s current national emissions.

Temperatures in Canada’s boreal forest already have risen more than 7 degrees F in some areas over the past century, causing dramatic changes in the timing of ecosystem events, including the emerging of springtime insects and the mating and nesting of birds. Migratory birds may arrive too late to take advantage of insect emergence, which is key to providing adequate food for nestlings. Global warming also is shifting bird distributions and altering their migration behavior and habitat, diminishing their survival ability and threatening some species with extinction.

Five: Bird and Habitat Destruction in the Future

The industrial footprint of tar sands operations may double in the next 15 years. Some facts:

• Proposed tar sands pipelines, such as the Keystone XL, would dramatically expand tar sands operations.
• The effects of tar sands development on bird habitat are projected to reduce the forest-dependent bird population by 10 to 50 percent.
• Strip mining of 1,200 square miles allocated for mines will destroy habitat for up to an estimated 3.6 million adult birds.
• Drilling infrastructure could eliminate or fragment another 19,000 square miles of migratory bird habitat—an area about twice the size of New Jersey.
• Tar sands operations also will reduce bird breeding. One estimate suggests that as many as 72 million fewer birds will hatch during a 40-year period.

What Can the United States Do about Canadian Tar Sands?

The devastation of invaluable wildlife habitat by tar sands operations is occurring in violation of international treaties to protect the shared migratory wildlife of Canada and the United States. In 1916, the two nations entered into the Migratory Bird Treaty, which gave rise to the Migratory Bird Convention, which protects birds that migrate between the countries. Under these agreements, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry can say no to pipeline projects, like Keystone XL, that will carry tar sands oil to ports on the Texas coast, enabling the tar sands industry to fulfill massive expansion plans.

Tell the Obama Administration to say no to the Keystone XL pipeline that will be used for this particularly dirty oil that threatens wildlife and habitat.

It was.

Was I happy to see it?

You bet.

I didn’t know until recently that some gardeners don’t like them. Apparently, chipmunks sometimes eat bulbs and ornamental flowers. Personally, despite the pleasure I get from seeing blossoms in my yard, I would just as soon grow chipmunks as nonnative ornamental plants. As for native plants, they should be adapted to chipmunks, given that one of the little rodent’s most important ecological roles is the spreading of seeds and, therefore, the spreading of plants, including those that produce berries—a benefit for many species.

Chipmunk Basics

Evolution must favor chipmunks, because it has made 21 species of them in North America. All but one of those species belongs to the genus of western chipmunks. The remaining loner is the eastern chipmunk, the denizen of my backyard, found across much of the eastern and central United States and Canada.

As a rule, chipmunks live in woodlands throughout much of North America. Relatives of tree squirrels, prairie dogs and various other ground squirrels, they are the pipsqueaks of the squirrel family—about the size of a mouse. Western chipmunks tend to be smaller than eastern, about 2 ounces to the eastern’s 4.5.

Chipmunk Habitat

Immature forests and forest edges provide chipmunks with the shrubs, fallen logs and other items the rodents use for cover. Though they do climb trees in search of food, generally they forage on the ground for seeds, insects and other small edibles, including special fungi that live around tree roots and that are critical to tree survival. Chipmunks help to spread fungi within a forest, just as they help spread seeds.

Burrows and Foods

Active by day, chipmunks shelter at night in burrows they may dig as much as 12 feet long but generally only about 3 feet deep. At the end of the burrow lies a sleeping chamber furnished with soft plant material. Some burrows include side tunnels and secondary dens. Although chipmunks tend to fight off other chipmunks that show up in the immediate area around their burrow openings, they share feeding areas with a minimum of fisticuffs.

Seasonal Behavior

Chipmunks produce one or two litters yearly, and young are on their own within eight weeks. Mean life expectancy is 2.3 years. During summer and fall, the rodents store seeds in their sleeping dens for use as winter food. When temperatures drop, chipmunks go underground. They don’t indulge in the deep hibernation favored by woodchucks, but instead tend to wake up periodically for a snack. On warm winter days, they may even surface above ground.

Chipmunk Chatter

Chipmunks issue alarms calls when danger looms. Distinct calls indicate terrestrial predators and aerial predators, says Lisa Aschemeier, a biologist at Ohio’s Northwest State Community College who studies the animals. She has found that chipmunks also respond to the high-pitched alarm whistles of their relative the woodchuck, sometimes seeking cover after a woodchuck warning. Woodchucks, she says, pay less attention to chipmunk alarms, presumably because, at up to 12 pounds, they are so much bigger and need not fear as many predators as do chipmunks.

Woodchucks may not show much interest in chipmunk communications, but some bird species do. Chipmunks nosh on eggs and nestlings up to three days old when the opportunity arises. Particularly vulnerable to chipmunk attacks are veeries, a type of thrush that nests in shrubs up to 3 feet off the ground, and ovenbirds, which nest only on the ground. When these birds hear chipmunk calls, they sense danger. Kenneth Schmidt, a biologist at Texas Tech University who studies eastern chipmunks, says that veeries sometimes adjust the height of their nests in response to chipmunk calls. Both veeries and ovenbirds may shift their territories to avoid nesting within chipmunk range.

Fending Off Chipmunks

Like veeries, you, too, may want to take precautions against these cute little burrowers, especially if they have been snacking on your carefully planted bulbs. They can be discouraged without being killed, and here are some ways to do so:

• Spray shrubs, other plants and the ground around bulbs with repellent, such as the anti-deer and anti-squirrel spray sold at garden shops. The spray will need frequent refreshment, so this approach could prove costly and time consuming, depending on the size of your garden.
• Cover flower beds with quarter-inch wire mesh or hardware cloth, allowing the material to extend a foot beyond the flower bed on all sides. Cover the material with dirt if you want to hide it. When bulbs emerge, remove the mesh or cloth.
• When planting bulbs in a bed, dig out the soil, line the bed with wire mesh or hardware cloth, refill with the soil, and add bulbs.
• Keeping a gap between your garden beds and any surrounding woods will help limit chipmunk activity, because these woodland creatures prefer to avoid crossing open ground. Isolating your plantings from brush and wood piles also should help.

Adapted in part from “The Key to Chipmunk Chatter,” National Wildlife magazine, April/May 2012

Help wildlife with your garden

Become a Wildlife Gardener with National Wildlife Federation. It’s free and you’ll get great wildlife gardening tips and learn how to certify your garden as an official habitat.

Many songbirds are master builders, putting together intricately made weavings of twig and leaf, stem and fluff, hair and moss. Some nests, like the Baltimore oriole’s, will hang from a tree branch like a small tote bag. Others, like the robin’s, are cups bristling with twigs painstakingly collected one or a few at a time. Even if you provide birdhouses in your garden, the birds that occupy them will build nests in them.

So, what can you do about it? Well, you can provide nesting material of a wide variety of types that appeal to a wide variety of birds, attracting avians to your garden as surely as you would with a feeder.

You have two ways to provide nesting materials: You can grow plants that offer construction goods, or you can offer raw items.

Plants

Twigs

For birds looking for small twigs, almost any tree or shrub you plant will do. When small branches or twigs fall from a shrub and gather at its base, leave them for birds to pick up, preferably in lengths under 4 inches.

Greenery

Some birds line nests with soft plant matter. You can provide this accoutrement by growing catkin-bearing trees and shrubs such as cottonwood, maple, mulberry, willows, poplar and beech.

Fluff

Many birds—hummingbirds spring to mind, but other songbirds as well—gravitate toward fluffy material, such as seeds with silky attachments designed to waft them on the wind or seed pods with a soft, hairlike covering. You can provide these items via cottonwood trees, lamb’s ear (ground cover), milkweed (also good for attracting monarch butterflies), honeysuckle, and clematis.

Mud

If you have a pesky spot in your garden that refuses to grow anything but dirt, try adding a little water and see if you can grow mud. Mud is a favored nesting material for swallows and swifts and even the common robin.

Dry grass

When you trim your yard, perhaps you can find a spot in your garden for laying out a selection of dried grass stems cut 2 to 4 inches long. Grass is a common ingredient in songbird nests, used by species from native sparrows to robins.

Moss

If you have a shady spot in your yard, trying growing moss; with its velvety green growth, moss is a beautiful highlight for any moist garden and is a favored building material of some hummingbird species.

Raw Materials

Hair

Almost any kind of fur or wool will do. Dog fur is probably handiest for most people, especially when dogs are shedding in spring. Curry them, take the fur off the brush, and put it in your garden (we’ll talk below about ways to distribute it). If you use goat hair or wool from a sheep, cut longer pieces into 4- to 6- inch lengths. Animal fiber works well for nesting, because it is durable and not inclined to soak up water. Just don’t use any fur that has been treated with flea dips or insect repellents.

Please do not try to provide human hair for birds! Human hair is so thin that it can easily wrap around birds legs and necks, cutting off their circulation and causing serious injury or death.

Snakeskins

Who doesn’t have a few snakeskins lying around going to waste? You don’t? Well, okay, but you never know when a snake might shed its skin in your yard. If you find one these integumentary artifacts—looking like thin, almost transparent parchment—hang it in a tree or shrub where a bird may find it and apply it to its décor.

Natural Fibers

You can offer fabric, yarn, twine or string made of natural fibers such as raw cotton, hemp, sisal or wool. These natural fibers won’t retain water in the nest, will eventually deteriorate naturally over time, and are similar to the fibers birds would find in the landscape. Cut them into one-inch-wide strips and in lengths under 6 inches long, and put them where birds will find them, such as on tree and shrub branches. Don’t use synthetic fibers or long lengths, which, like hair, can tangle and injure birds.

Don’t Use Dryer Lint!

The lint collected in your dryer filter may seem like ideal nesting material, but it isn’t. It will soak up water and may be steeped with chemicals unhealthy for birds, such as remnants of detergent and softener.

Delivery Systems

So you have a collection of wool, dog hair and strips of natural fibers. How do you do deliver it to birds?  My favorite method: Cram a mix of the items into a suet feeder, giving songbirds access to a smorgasbord of building basics. Or, fill the head of a kitchen whisk with the various materials and hang the whisk by its handle from a tree or shrub. Do-it-yourselfers might like tocheck out a designfor an easily made wire holder.

Aside from bribing them into your garden with foodstuff, providing nesting material is one of the best ways to attract spring and summer birds. If you offer it, they will build.

Become a Wildlife Gardener with National Wildlife Federation. It’s free and you’ll get great wildlife gardening tips and learn how to certify your garden as an official habitat.

More information from National Wildlife magazine:

How to garden for climate change

Inviting toads into your yard

Anyone prone to working the soil knows that upturning the earth exposes these shiny, wigging, pinkish to brownish tubular life forms, sending them thrashing in hasty retreat into the comforting, moist darkness of the soil.

Are the worms a garden’s friend or foe?

That depends.

Here are 10 things you may want to know about earthworms.

1. Earthworms come in a seemly infinite variety—around 6,000 species worldwide. One of the most familiar of them, the sort you may see in your garden, is commonly known as the night crawler (it typically surfaces after dark), the angleworm (its makes popular bait for fishing) or the rain worm (it leaves waterlogged soil after storms).
2. Of the more than 180 earthworm species found in the United States and Canada, 60 are invasive species, brought over from the Old World, including the night crawler.
3. Lacking lungs or other specialized respiratory organs, earthworms breathe through their skin.
4. The skin exudes a lubricating fluid that makes moving through underground burrows easier and helps keep skin moist. One Australian species can shoot fluid as far as 12 inches through skin pores.
5. Each earthworm is both male and female, producing both eggs and sperm. They mate on the surface of the earth, pressing their bodies together and exchanging sperm before separating. Later, the clitellum, a collarlike organ that goes around the worm’s body the way a cigar band does a cigar, produces a ring around the worm. As the worm crawls out of the ring, it fills the ring with eggs and sperm. The ring drops off, seals shut at the ends and becomes a cocoon for the developing eggs.
   

   

6. Baby worms emerge from the eggs tiny but fully formed. They grow sex organs within the first two or three months of life and reach full size in about a year. They may live up to eight years, though one to two is more likely.
7. Full size for an earthworm varies among species, ranging from less than half an inch long to nearly 10 feet. The latter monsters don’t occur in U.S. backyards—you’ll have to go to the Tropics to see one of them. The homegrown versions top out at around 14 inches.
8. The glaciers that crawled across Canada into the northern tier of the lower 48 states during the most recent ice age wiped out earthworms in those areas. In other parts of the United States, you may find native earthworm species, but the worms living in the regions scoured by glaciers are invaders from overseas, brought here intentionally by early settlers on the assumption that the worms would improve the soil, or carried accidentally in shipments of plants or even in dirt used as ballast in ships.
9. The earthworm’s digestive system is a tube running straight from the mouth, located at the tip of the front end of the body, to the rear of the body, where digested material is passed to the outside. Species vary in what they eat, but by and large their devouring of fallen leaves and/or soil allows the worms to move nutrients such as potassium and nitrogen into the soil. Also, worm movements within the earth create burrows that encourage the passage of air and a loosening of the soil. Good things, right? Well, maybe not. Which brings us to 10.
10. The northern forest evolved after the glaciers retreated, yielding an ecosystem that does not benefit from earthworms. These forests require a deep layer of slowly decomposing leaves and other organic matter called “duff” that overlays the soil. When earthworms invade these forests, they quickly eat up the duff, with the result that nutrients become less available to young, growing plants, and the soil, instead of aerating and loosening, becomes more compact. The combined effects of such developments have resulted in damage to trees such as sugar maples and to many forest herbs and understory plants, such as trillium, rare goblin ferns, trout lilies and other forest-floor species. In some areas, oak forests have been overrun by buckthorn, and in others the presence of earthworms has allowed the invasion of Japanese barberry. As duff disappears, so do the insects and other small creatures that depend on it for survival, with the result that animals such as salamanders lose a key food source and face population declines. Earthworm burrows also may speed the passage of water through forest soil, another change that might be a benefit to farmland or a garden with compacted soil but that is a negative in a northern forest.

BONUS FACT: Although eradicating earthworms in areas they have already invaded is virtually impossible in practical terms (the measures that wipe out earthworms, such as spraying with pesticides, also kill many other species), we can all help protect as-yet uninvaded ecosystems by keeping worms out of such areas. If you use earthworms for composting and live in a region near forests that have not been hit by earthworms, you can help by dropping use of the worms. Also, to avoid spreading earthworm eggs when fertilizing with composted materials, freeze your compost for at least a week before using it—freezing will kill eggs as well as the worms. If you use earthworms for bait fishing, don’t dump leftover worms onto the soil at the end of a day’s fishing. Remove them from the site, or throw them far enough into a pond that they will die before they can reach to shore. When planting new shrubs or trees in your garden or yard, examine any earth ball or potting soil for evidence of worms.

Become a Wildlife Gardener with National Wildlife Federation. It’s free and you’ll get great wildlife gardening tips and learn how to certify your garden as an official habitat.

Where Snow Comes From

The short answer: clouds. But of course, nothing is that simple.

Snow begins as droplets of water in clouds. The droplets gather together around a nucleus that can be a tiny ice particle, dust or even bacteria. Under freezing conditions, the nucleus allows the drops to form a lattice work, with more and more droplets accumulating into a mote of snow, or snowflake.

The pattern that a snowflake forms depends on temperature, humidity and movement of the flake through the atmosphere. Not all snow takes the classic flake form. Some form tiny columns or tubes. Because the forces creating any given snowflake are, if not unique, at least very unusual, it is highly unlikely, though not impossible, that any two snowflakes will be identical.

When snow falls to earth, it can take various forms, ranging from dry and powdery to hail, which shapes up when snow alternately melts and freezes during its fall, allowing wet globules to mash together.

How Snow Falls

When snow comes down in brief, light amounts, it constitutes a snow shower. A snow storm is heavy snowfall. Add wind, and you have a blizzard. However, falling snow is not a precondition for a blizzard—hard winds blowing snow already on the ground also qualifies. Question: How does snow fall at Washington State’s Mount Rainier? Answer: Very heavily—the mountain is subject to the highest average annual snowfall in North America, 641 inches, with highs in unusual years in excess of 1,100 inches.

The air between flakes of freshly fallen snow dampens the vibration of sound waves, giving the post-snowstorm world its reverently muted quality. Once snow melts and refreezes, the muffling quality is lost—ice doesn’t trap sound.

Snow and Plants

So let there be snow. Put a blanket of snow over plants, and they will be insulated from temperature fluctuations and from wind, especially if a thin crust of ice takes shape over the snow. The ground under snow does not freeze, so roots may even grow, if only a little, under a snow blanket, even as activity in branches stops. Following a winter of persistent snow cover, gardeners can anticipate healthier spring and summer plants, with more fruits and flowers.

Of course, every fluffy, white cloud has a dark lining, as the song doesn’t say, so naturally snow has some negatives. Notably, heavy snow can build up on tree branches, especially those of pine trees, causing branches to snap or young trees to bend and break. In nature, such fallen branches and trees may provide dens for wildlife, or breeding places for insects favored as food by birds. In the garden, however, you may want to whack low branches with a broom to knock off heavy snow.

In spring, melting snow becomes a vital water source for soil and plants. Even in summer, snowmelt retained in soil offer plants reserves of water.

Snow and Wildlife

Some species—the arctic fox, snowshoe hare and long-tailed weasel among them—are so well adapted to snowy environs that they change brown summer coats into white during snow season. However, changes in the duration of annual snow cover due to climate change seems to be disrupting this elegant system of camouflage, according to a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Climate models suggest that the yearly duration of snow cover in snowshoe hare range, which lies across Canada and the northern reaches of the United States, could be reduced by as much as 40 days late in this century. Result: white hares against a background of brown soil and dead leaves, making the animals particularly visible to the predators that already account for 85 percent or more of hare mortality.

If snowshoe hare populations dwindle under the new regimen, the effects on a species such as the Canada lynx, which specializes in hunting the hares, could be significant. Other species that molt from brown to white in winter could be similarly beset with new survival challenges.

Outdoor Snow Activities

Become a wildlife gardener with National Wildlife Federation. It’s free and you’ll get great wildlife gardening tips and learn how to certify your garden as an official habitat.

You can also build a snow owl or snowshoe hare out of…snow. Then, learn how snow reveals the secret life of your backyard.

An example of how the commitment and generosity of NWF members turn into action on the ground can be seen in the efforts of John Schilbe, an NWF member since the 1970s, and his wife Debbie, who support the Federation’s work educating Americans about conservation and protecting wildlife, particularly bison and bighorn sheep through Adopt A Wildlife Acre.

Honoring a Relative

Last year, John’s mother, Florence, passed away two days shy of her 100th birthday. For John and Debbie, it was a natural decision to honor Florence’s life with a memorial tribute to the National Wildlife Federation.

There she met John’s dad, Lloyd, who worked up the street at the State Capitol. Michigan law at the time precluded married women from working as teachers, so when Florence and Lloyd decided to marry, Florence turned in her resignation at the end of the school year and went to work raising her family. She brought up John with visits to zoos and the outdoors, and John believes Florence would have been an ardent advocate of Eco-Schools USA, the NWF program that strives to integrate science and environmentally sound practices into school curricula and improve science-based academic performance among students. “We appreciate the good work that NWF does,” John says, “and it feels right to honor my mother with a tribute in this meaningful way.”

How You Can Help

Donors like the Schilbes who honor friends and relatives through their philanthropy are among NWF’s best advocates and the reason that the Federation’s conservation efforts continue. This holiday season, give a gift that creates a better future for wildlife by making a tribute gift. Or help wildlife by participating in Adopt A Wildlife Acre.

In making these calls, we touch base person-to-person with the people who make our work on behalf of wildlife possible, allowing NWF to protect species from bison to bears, whales to wolves, and to save habitat ranging from the Chesapeake Bay and Appalachian Mountains in the East to Pacific shores and Puget Sound in the West.

You are More Than Just Donors

Each year, when I make my calls, I am impressed with the understanding and involvement of NWF donors.

One donor I talked with this year who really stood out for me was Joyce, a wildlife rehabilitator in West Allis, Wisconsin, who told me that earlier in the day, she had had to rescue a Cooper’s hawk that had crashed through a double-pane window in a private home, leaving a 12- to 15-inch hole in the glass. She turned the bird over to veterinary staff, who were checking it for injuries. It seemed likely to recover.

She also told me about a screech owl she had freed one time from a mouse sticky trap—a piece of heavy paper coated with a glue-like substance. Giving the owl its liberty was the work of minutes, but recovery of its feathers was a longer process. The mouse traps also had caught several sparrows. Joyce’s message: Don’t use sticky mouse traps outdoors, where they can capture nontarget species.

People like Joyce show that the commitment of NWF donors to wildlife is more than dollars deep, giving NWF staffers the gifts of inspiration and encouragement along with that of funding.

We can’t phone everyone on our donor list, which runs to thousands and thousands of people with a serious interest in wildlife, but with luck, our blogs can reach many more readers with a heartfelt thank you, and with wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving to you all!