We have xeriscape so I pull the weeds and encourage the cactus and mormon tea.
Gathered 40 bags of weeds to also get a fire perimeter.
We found a chipmunk nest in our AC and a frantic mother running around inside our house. Both were encouraged to get out into nature.
A bull snake adopted our yard as its home ( probably because of the chipmunks!) so I am awaiting some natural oil stuff to encourage the snake to find another habitat.
We were traveling for a month and the hummingbird feeder went dry. Replenished but no sign of takers yet. Hoping for a build it and they will come (again).
The hummers will be back! We have several feeders that we don’t refill in the summer to encourage the birdies to eat a variety, and they always come back in the fall when we refill the feeders for the cold season!
No feeders of any kind here…we want to discourage the…bears!
We love spring and summer in New England. We have something blooming all the time and it’s fun to see.
We have 7 hanging plants around in addition to the two on our front porch. Nice bright colors! DH is vigilant about watering those when needed (and that will be the case with the 90 degree plus days for the next four days).
We have a rather large yard, and we do hire someone to cut the grass. This year, they will also remulch a long slope that has various bushes and perennials growing on it. That’s our view from our front window.
We have a very old maple that has housed raccoons for at least 60 years (it’s huge and we have it pruned every 10 years, the only reason I know they’re still there is my tree guy). We have a bird buddy, a feeder with a camera. We have a vegetable garden every summer, we do put cages around some plants, the bunnies already ate all of the leaves off of the zucchini. I do put out water for the critters when it gets hot (so this oncoming week). Our town has been plagued with our power company digging up streets for several years, causing a rat issue. Our exterminator put out bait traps (started with snap traps but our neighbors have young kids who we allow to play in our front yard, lots are small, and they made me nervous )Went a year without chipmunks , but they’re back this year.
I have French doors in my home office, and one year a hummingbird built a nest on the doorknob. Super cute to see the eggs hatch and the babies grow up. We left the empty nest alone and had successive hummingbirds use nest over the next few years.
By that point the doorknob was absolutely filthy. So when our gardeners knocked it off we weren’t too upset and were happy to finally clean it up. Sadly no more hummingbird nests since then.
We also have bobcats strolling through the yard every once in a while. One year an adult and two cubs hung out in our courtyard and backyard all summer like they owned the place and we left them alone.
We have to discourage raccoons by closing the cat flap at night. They raid our pantry if we don’t. In any case it’s a good idea as the cam picks up coyote and bobcats as well as the occasional fox doing nocturnal visits (the bobcat has a very defined path that he treads). The raccoons also mess up the one patch of lawn we have in our drought+friendly yard, so we have motion activated sprayers. Then they chewed through the water pipes to those . We discourage the deer from eating our plants (in a slapstick comedy twist, my husband once sprayed a flower bed with weed killer instead of deer repellent… oops). We also get occasional visits from skunks and turkeys. I probably left something out lol but we basically get everything except bears and mountain lions.
We have lots of birds of all sizes. We didn’t specifically do this to encourage birds, but we put in a water feature that they love. It’s set on a timer but one can change it. During Covid when I worked in the dining room, I would notice a bunch of birds starting to wait around it in the morning for the water to switch on!! So we’d turn it on and they would have a party. The hummingbirds love that as well as our various flowers - we don’t have any specific bird feeders. We have a resident couple of owls in the trees that we hear nightly, and a family of California quail living somewhere in the back yard (the back of it is a steep slope that we don’t use and mostly just natural vegetation). They are very cute and taking babies on walks at the moment -they often cross our patio. The only annoying birds are the woodpeckers, who sometimes decide our siding is worth a peck, but mostly they stick to the trees.
Some quail on our patio: (hard to get good quail pictures as they run away if they see you move closer)
We always have a groundhog that lives under our shed. H feeds him/her apples and pears every day. Some years are better than others, but he usually has them trained. He will whistle when he sets it out and then walk away and hide, they’ll come out, look around to see if anyone is around, grab the fruit, and run back to the hole.
Occasionally we have a raccoon or a possum. Deer come through pretty regularly. If H saw a bobcat, he would try to adopt it!
Snakes are common for H to see doing yardwork. Black are ok. Copperheads, no. The well to do neighborhood behind us is full of copperheads. Old hilly neighborhood full of gullies and lots of ivy around.
We have a lot of birds. We don’t put out water or food but they love our yard. We are open to nests but not in two spots. My husband has been fighting a battle since spring with a pair of birds that want to nest above our patio door on our bedroom deck. We have open beams and they want to nest in a safe spot. We had the same issue last year and last year the birds won. They must have had 5 or 6 sets of babies. This year when they came back my husband started putting boxes on the one beam. The birds moved to the other beam. We how have an assortment of boxes running on both beams.
The odd thing is we have lived here for 26 years and it’s only the last two we have had birds trying to nest in this spot.
We run a resort for gophers. Don’t even know where to begin to get rid of them.
We have neighborhood wild ducks. We shoo them away whenever we find them in our yard as H doesn’t wants them taking up residence and pooping. We have cats that also roam the neighborhood, including from our neighbor across the street. We try to discourage but don’t make too much of an effort.
Our house is surrounded by greenery with NGPAs on 2 sides. Raccoons, bunnies, deer, bobcats, coyotes, wood rats, bats galore! We only actively encourage the bats. Husband put up a bathouse that I carefully researched to make sure it fits the picky critters’ real estate criteria. They are so efficient at vacuuming up the mosquitoes we haven’t had any issues with bugs on our deck, knock on wood.
A few years ago a mallard duck couple decided to nest in the swamp just below us. Husband fed them some corn, and the ducks started coming up to our deck demanding breakfast! Then one night we watched how a barred owl couple tried to ambush said ducks! It was quite a hunt, but the ducks were too fast to be caught.
This dear (deer!) was moseying through our hill yesterday mid afternoon. This one seems to be lost as it has been seen all through the neighborhood lately, always alone which here is unusual. We wonder if mama abandoned.
There are tons of deer here though so I look up “deer resistant” before I plant anything and then hope for the best.
Tons of birds from Baltimore orioles to duck families to great blue herons to eagles! I just downloaded the Merlin app last week!
So we don’t feed anything but they find plenty to feed on here. It’s great for my husband who has multiple degrees in forestry and wildlife management !
We have an owl house and love watching the babies grow. That’s one example of something we encourage.
Foxes have just shown up recently. The den is under a shed in our neighbor’s yard, but when the mom wants to get away she hangs out under out deck.
Clearly we have possums – see recent Say It Here post. And when they are dead we have buzzards.
We smell skunks on the regular. We def don’t encourage those, but that’s what comes with backing to greenbelt, I guess. Our back yard is part grass and part pretty wild.
I love the Merlin Bird ID app (free version)! I one time used it in Los Angeles and it could not ID the wild flock of non native parakeets that live there.
I also love the Skyview Lite app (free version)
and just found the Animal Scat Identifier (free version) very helpful.
The plant ID and animal ID that seems to come on my iPhone 15 pro when I take a photo has been pretty accurate, also.
We have at last count 5 nesting couples – 2 robins, 1 wren, 1 catbird, 1 sparrow — in our two birdhouses and various bushes. We have a climbing rose outside our kitchen with one of the robin families.
We only do birdfeeders Thanksgiving to Easter, because of bears. Deer are around but are choosy. The hawks take care of some rabbits but there are. so. many. Don’t have snakes. Do have groundhogs, which I trap and release onto state game land. We had a bat house but couldn’t keep the gray squirrels out of it.
All this in our .40 acre very suburban yard. We converted a chunk into a meadow and that certainly has encouragrd the critters. I like the activity, variety, and daily changes but I draw the line at the groundhogs.
We live in the Midwest in a subdivision. My yard is probably the wildest. Our back (we have 2 acres) is mostly prairie. We have ground squirrels and a fox snake there. Near the house we get chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits. We often have deer bed in the back and coyotes and foxes cruise by. I wish my neighbors would do something more with their yards. Two acres of mowed grass is so boring to me.
. We discourage the deer from eating our plants (in a slapstick comedy twist, my husband once sprayed a flower bed with weed killer instead of deer repellent… oops). We also get occasional visits from skunks and turkeys. I probably left something out lol but we basically get everything except bears and mountain lions.
Then one night we watched how a barred owl couple tried to ambush said ducks! It was quite a hunt, but the ducks were too fast to be caught.
