Create A Certified Wildlife Habitat At Home With The National Wildlife Federation

Loss of habitat, pesticide use and climate change continue to devastate wildlife populations, and conserving the remaining wild spaces simply won’t do enough to reverse this trend. Developed areas will need to become more welcoming toward and supportive of insects, birds and other animals in order to stop the decline.

For nearly half a century, the National Wildlife Federation, the largest U.S. private, nonprofit conservation education and advocacy organization, has given homeowners and others who steward land the information, education and confidence they need to create spaces that are inviting to both resident and migratory wildlife.

NWF’s Garden for Wildlife initiative offers the opportunity to officially designate a garden, schoolyard, workplace or other managed greenspace as a Certified Wildlife Habitat after meeting certain criteria.

Long Island has 1,819 Certified Wildlife Habitats, including many on the East End. Getting certified is not an onerous process, but it does take commitment.

The program calls on anyone who has the opportunity to add plants to a landscape to support wildlife by providing food, water, cover and a place to raise young. And in some ways getting certified is about what gardeners refrain from doing — like using chemical pesticides and fertilizers — rather than doing more.

Mary Phillips has led Garden for Wildlife and the Certified Wildlife Habitat program since 2014 and is looking forward to the effort’s 50th anniversary in 2023. She can speak to the threat that wildlife faces and the things homeowners and others can be doing to turn the tide.

For example, Phillips notes that the monarch butterfly population has had a 90 percent decline in the past 20 years. “Also, bird populations have been down significantly since 1970,” she points out.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the wild bird population in the continental United States and Canada has shrunk by 2.9 billion, which amounts to nearly 30 percent of the count in 1970.

Bird decline is tied in many ways to insect decline. Birds and other wildlife depend on insects for food, plus agriculture relies on insects for pollination. And insects provide countless other under-appreciated ecological services.

The more that homeowners and others can do to provide food, water, cover and a place for animals to rear their young, the better for stopping and turning around the declines. It doesn’t take a big yard. These elements can be put together in any environment and yield success.

“Even people on patios can support wildlife and provide nectar and pollen and host plants for specific wildlife,” Phillips says. “So it’s really an empowering experience to plant these plants, create this space, and often you see results in one season — sometimes a 50 percent increase in wildlife.”

Ticking off the boxes to become certified can largely be achieved by planting more flowers, shrubs and trees — but not just any will do.

“You really just need a good variety of native plants, and many of those native plants then provide the food and the cover and places for wildlife to raise young, because many of them are host plants for caterpillars, for example, and those caterpillars also provide the food for birds,” Phillips says. “So you’re kind of hitting all the bases.”

The caterpillars of native moths and butterflies can only survive by munching on native plants that they co-evolved with. And the plants can shrug off the caterpillar damage and continue to thrive because of that evolutionary relationship.

When a landscape contains mostly non-native plants, native moths and butterflies have few places to lay their eggs, and birds will, in turn, have no caterpillars available to feed their nestlings.

Unfortunately, finding native plants to purchase can be a chore. They are not as readily available as plants that were raised for their marketability rather than their ecological benefits.

Understanding the nomenclature used in horticulture is also necessary, as the meaning of certain terms is not always apparent. For instance, if a plant is not an exotic, does that mean it’s a native? Well, no, not necessarily.

Take, for example, Monarda didyma, known as scarlet bee balm, a flower in the mint family that is also called red bergamot because it smells like bergamot orange. The species is native to the Lower 48 and considered especially important to bumblebees, while also attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds.

However, the Monarda found at a nursery is unlikely to be the straight species. It is more likely to be a cultivar of Monarda with a commercial name tacked on, such as Monarda “Balmy Pink” or Monarda “Scorpion.” Cultivars are created by human-led plant selection and often by hybridizing two species, like Monarda didyma crossed with another native, Monarda fistulosa, which is often called wild bergamot or wild bee balm.

The problem with cultivars is that they have been bred selectively for traits that commercial growers, retailers and consumers find appealing, rather than what insects and birds find appealing.

“Sometimes the wildlife attributes have been bred out of them,” Phillips says.

A cultivar that is a different color and size from the straight species it was derived from may not be as useful for a pollinator. And some cultivars are designed to never go to seed, which means their blooms won’t become food for birds after they fade.

In the case of coneflowers, Phillips says, the cultivars are often bred for more layers of bloom, but that structure is prohibitive for some pollinators to use their proboscis to get nectar from the flower.

“That’s one of the reasons we at National Wildlife Federation really recommend the straight species native plants,” she says.

Recognizing that there is growing consumer desire for true native plants but that finding them is challenging, NWF has begun offering native plant collections online at gardenforwildlife.com. Working with commercial growers of native plants, NWF has curated these collections to serve different regions. The offerings are now available in 36 states and growing.

“You can just look at your state list and get a selection of plants that we’ve combined for multi-season bloom,” Phillips says. “You can either get three-packs, six-packs or 12-packs.”

The Northeast collection of “Pollinator Power” includes cardinal flower, great blue lobelia, Virginia mountain mint and black-eyed Susan, while the Southeast version includes narrow leaved sunflower, spotted beebalm, frostweed and blue mistflower.

Also among the collections are “Monarch Munchables,” “Spring Bee Buffet” and “Hummingbird Heroes.”

For those who would like to have a Certified Wildlife Habitat but are concerned that deer would mow down their investments, it’s important to realize that many native plants are unappealing to deer. Deer stay away from milkweed and from fragrant flowers such as anise hyssop and bee balm.

“Those kinds of plants are actually really good deer deterrents, and they’re phenomenal for pollinators,” Phillips says.

If a property is not already near a water source, such as a natural stream or big body of water within a mile, a water source should be added, such as a bird bath or artificial pond.

“We also ask people to commit to sustainable gardening practices so that they’re not using harmful chemicals,” Phillips says.

Chemical fertilizers readily pollute water bodies, and broad-spectrum pesticides, even organic options for killing mosquitoes and ticks, will kill the pollinators that gardeners are hoping to attract.

“We’re trying to educate people that, yes, those mosquitoes are challenging, but really trying to get rid of your water — stagnant water sources — would help to get rid of those,” Phillips advises.

If installing a birdbath to meet the water requirement of certification, she recommends adding a bubbler that will stop it from becoming a mosquito breeding ground.

For properties that front a pond or have a stream running through, NWF encourages a riparian buffer, which Phillips says is like a marsh. It’s designed to use plants to filter out pollutants from runoff before they enter the water body.

In general, the program encourages reducing lawn and turning it into a genetically diverse and flower-abundant space. At the same time, it calls for controlling invasive, exotic species that outcompete native plants and fauna. This can mean removing aggressive vines like Asiatic bittersweet, Japanese wisteria and English ivy, but NWF also specifies keeping cats indoors, due to cats’ tendency to hunt or harass birds.

Installing birdhouses is also encouraged, though Phillips notes that they should be kept clean so that they don’t perpetuate any diseases.

Bird feeders are okay, too, she adds, but plants that provide seed heads and host caterpillars are preferred.

“About 96 percent of birds rely on insects as their main staple,” she says. “So having these plants that are host plants for a lot of these caterpillars, you’re really helping the birds at a much more in-depth level.”

And don’t neglect reptiles and amphibians. In addition to adding plants of various sizes to a landscape to provide cover, leaving out decaying logs gives frogs and salamanders valuable habitat.

Guidance on getting started and instructions on how to certify are available at nwf.org/certify. Once the application is complete and $20 processing fee is paid, participants receive a certification package and are offered the opportunity to purchase a Certified Wild Habitat sign to post in their yards.

Phillips says, historically, only about half of participants purchased a sign, but in the last few years that figure has grown to 60 percent. Apparently, more people want to raise awareness of the need to support wildlife — and they wish to inspire others.