April 2010
Backyard Wildlife Habitats
by Karen Boehler
It’s a beautiful spring evening in New Mexico. Outside your living room window, the final rays of the setting sun are painting the sky brilliant hues of red, orange and yellow.
At the edge of your yard, a small herd of pronghorn antelope browse on wild grasses. A variety of birds snack at the feeders closer to the house, sitting quietly to eat, then flying off quickly when disturbed by a new visitor.
Hummingbirds gather at a feeder, while at a nearby pond, a gray fox laps at the water that houses fish and frogs, and which dragonflies use as a stopover on their migratory routes.
An unusual occurrence? Not if you’ve registered your backyard as a Certified Wildlife Habitat with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF).
More than 30 years ago, the NWF published an article in National Wildlife Magazine on how to accommodate birds. “What kind of feed to use for different kinds of birds and how to create a habitat for birds in your backyard,” says spokesperson Mary Burnette. The article drew what Burnette calls “a tremendous amount of response” from people across the country wanting to know more. “As a result of seeing how that whole topic resonated with the magazine readers, the idea was posed that we would create a backyard habitat program to teach people how to create habitat and nurture the wildlife wherever they lived,” Burnette says.
About a year later, the program officially began and today there are thousands of backyard wildlife habitats across the country with 723 in New Mexico alone.
Creating a habitat does take a little effort, but from talking with New Mexicans from Mora to Columbus, from El Morro to Tres Piedras, it’s definitely a labor of love.
And while you don’t need a lot of land or to even own your property—Burnette says the most unusual site certified was a 32nd floor apartment balcony in New York City that had created a butterfly garden.
“Certainly in the west, we’ll have people with several acres, whereas in more suburban areas, we’ll have people with your basic suburban house/backyard which may not be very big at all,” Burnette says.
But whether you live in Chama or Springer, Clovis or Grants, you can find a way to attract nature’s wildlife. “It really runs the gamut,” Burnette says. “One of the things we say is no matter where you are, there’s usually something you can do to help the wildlife where you live, regardless of how big your property is or whether it’s urban or rural, or if you’re in the middle of the city. There’s something that you can do.”
Where most people start is with birds, and that’s where Bonnie Long, who lives 15 miles from Estancia in the piñon-juniper foothills of the Manzano Mountains off Highway 337, still concentrates.
“It’s basically for the birds, and I have lots of birds,” Long says of her habitat. Her 20 acres are not far from the Cibola National Forest, so she attracts everything from coyotes to deer to fox, and she’s seen mountain lion tracks in her yard.
The deer, coyotes and occasional bear are attracted to the 12,000-gallon fish pond she installed in 2002 and a 300-gallon stock tank that’s further from the house.
Since there are no natural sources of water nearby, the water is key. But for the birds, she also puts out food, noting that last summer alone she used more than 240 pounds of sugar for the hummingbirds, both migratory and the broad-tailed and black-chinned, which nest on her property. “The more feeders you put up the more you attract,” she laughs.
Long is a member of the Audubon Society and a group that calls themselves the “Thursday Birders.” Along with her neighbor, Bill Simms, who specializes in attracting bluebirds, she hosts a pot-luck and bird-watching day for Audubon members every summer, and really didn’t think she needed the certification.
“I always thought about doing it, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t have to have a certification because I know my yard’s good. I know I attract a lot of wildlife,’” she says. “But last year, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just go and do it.’ I wanted to have a sign up to show my birding friends when they came.’”
Across the state to the west, Frank and Vicky Giannangelo run Giannangelo Farms Southwest, where they promote creative organic gardening, attracting everything from prairie dogs to salamanders to snakes. And while snakes may not be everyone’s idea of the kind of wildlife they want to attract, that’s exactly what Jan Macek wants to find in her yard.
Living in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, her property is smaller, more of the backyard variety of habitat, and, she says, “We let our backyard go crazy,” with a huge flower garden, lots of trees and bird feeders. “We have trees in the front and we have bushes on the side and we take care of it, yet we let it kind of go. We like a little wild.”
In the early 1990s, her daughter brought some snakes home, and Macek was hooked. She began taking snakes that neighbors brought her, and rescued others. The snakes’ plight became more desperate after the Cerro Grande Fire in May 2000, “when our beautiful countryside was destroyed and people wouldn’t share with wildlife when they were looking for a new home,” Macek says.
Macek admits she’s not the most popular neighbor on her street, but “I just love snakes, and I do what I can for them.”
For anyone else wanting to attract snakes, it’s easy, Macek says.“If you have a pond, snakes love water. They absolutely love water.”
Just off NM 337, about halfway between Stanley and Moriarty, Susan Hoffman says, “It’s just amazing what we’ve seen out here.”
She has 10 acres she certified about a year ago, and counts among her most prized sightings an endangered swift fox that was sleeping under her truck. When she got in the truck, the fox started stalking a cottontail rabbit and the two ran off into the grasslands.
She’s also had two different species of frogs last summer and a long-billed curlew, North America’s largest shorebird.
Farther north, in Mora, Carl Kirby talks about the problems of putting up commercial bird feeders in bear country.
“Normally the bears will have them torn down within a week,” he says. “So what we end up doing is setting out some stumps, and hollowing out the tops of them so we can put bird seed or sunflower seed in them, then the bear just comes along and will kind of tip them over, eat whatever’s in there, then go on his way.” Kirby then refills the feeders and the birds eat until the bears return.
Kirby also has gotten away from hanging hummingbird feeders—which the bears also like—instead planting wildflowers that attract hummingbirds. Besides the bears, which are common in the summer, Kirby regularly gets gray fox and Abert’s squirrels, and occasionally raccoon or a spotted skunk.
In colder climes such as Mora, “I notice a lot of wildlife enjoy the water just as much as the food,” he says. So while he has a pond in the summer—which the bears like to sit in—for the winter he puts out dishes that can be cleaned and filled with warm water.
Jan Wright of Sandia Park attracts wildlife from deer to coyotes to owls, woodpeckers and foxes,”but my favorite is our garden toad,” she says. “He—or she, we don’t know—comes throughout July. I have a great picture of it bathing in the little fountain in our courtyard. We deliberately made our fountain very small, with an underground water basin collector, so that we weren’t evaporating a lot of water, and use rainwater collection to refill it. It’s basically just a pump underneath, a nice rock that makes a bathing spot, and a little tube that pours water into the rock.
“Our toad is about five to six inches in diameter, and comes nearly every night when the season is right. It’s been coming for about five years now, and once we saw two of them. At night, we turn on the front door light so it can catch bugs. It hangs out for several hours.”
And it’s not just individuals that certify their properties. Tom and Sheri McWethy-Kennedy own the Cimarron Rose Bed and Breakfast in Grants, a “green, conservation oriented inn.” They highlight their habitat on their Web site, www.cimarronrose.com. “Organic materials supplied by our two resident goats and horse, Cimarron, are used to fertilize our half-acre of perennial gardens certified by the National Wildlife Federation as ‘Backyard Wildlife Habitat,’” the site states. “These gardens provide food and shelter for our many wildlife friends, from Western fence lizards to our more than 80 species of birds.”
In Los Alamos, the Pajarito Education Environment Center helps area residents turn their back yards into certified habitats and now the Los Alamos area has more than 50 habitats.
White Sands Missile Range outside of Las Cruces is a certified wildlife habitat, along with the Yaxche School in Taos, Wolfsong Ranch Foundation in Rodeo, La Cueva Lodge in Jemez, P and S Farm in Williamsburg, and El Morrow RV Park in Ramah, among others.
And while habitat owners run the gamut from the mayor of Los Ranchos to transplanted Chicago professionals to writers to retired folk, they all seem to have one thing in common: a love of what they do.
Most are photographers, many blog about their experiences and most of the businesses have Web sites that mention their habitats. And they can’t wait to share their experiences with others.
“I would love to share with you some wildlife stories, some heart-warming, some exciting, and some sad. I can say, after years of visiting national parks and wildlife areas, I’ve had more wildlife experiences at and around our home near Stanley than anywhere else. I have also witnessed the effects of even minimal human presence and use of the land on delicate ecosystems like the short-grass prairie,” says Hoffman. “Most people look at where we live and say ‘There’s nothing out here,’ but they just don’t take the time to really look, or look in the right places. This place has taught me how.”
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