There are a number of benefits of welcoming wildlife into your backyard, garden or local community areas. One of the major benefits includes their natural pest control abilities. Here’s a few tips on what to do to care for and conserve our wild fauna in your own environment.
- Plant native trees, bushes and shrubs – to encourage wildlife into your yard. Provide an understory of different sized bushes and mulch the ground to encourage smaller fauna such as lizards.
- Leave tree bark and preserve tree hollows – Native animals live under the bark of trees and in hollows. If you remove bark or hollows you may be taking away a home.
- Using alternatives to poisons in the garden – some commercial pesticides are very toxic and may pass through the food chain. Poisoning ‘pests’ in the garden may be inadvertently poisoning wildlife!
- Mowing the lawn? In spring and summer walk round the lawn before your parents mow the yard to check there are no lizards sunning themselves in the grass.
- Baby birds left to learn – Baby birds learn how to fly from the ground. Only rescue them if there is no sign of the parent bird coming back to feed it or if the baby bird is in danger. Mother bird is much better at looking after her babies then we are!
- Snake alert – If you see a snake, stand quite still and it will think you are a tree and will move on.
- Water please! – Put out water in a shady place for birds and lizards. –
And somewhere safe to perch on too please – Make a bird table to encourage native birds.
