Attracting Winter Wildlife to Your Backyard Pond

Attracting wildlife to your pond is so very important. In our world, we are rapidly destroying wildlife habitats with paving, clearing land for building and then planting lawns or building decks. Most of us who are gardeners already offer birds, butterflies, aquatic creatures, insects and amphibians shelter and food in the summers, but if we are to keep our wild life diversity, we must provide for our wild friends, not just in the summer, but in the winter as well. When the winter winds are blowing and snow is getting deeper, our garden creatures and woodland wildlife can get cold and hungry. We can provide shelter, food and water to our furry, feathered and scaly friends easily, so they will be around when we need them. And we do.

Wildlife is drawn to the sound of falling water, but we turn our waterfalls off in the icy weather and remove our pumps, so how do we still attract our overwintering birds and other critters?

Give the birds a drink

Here's another way besides that shallow spot in your pond to give birds a drink: Attach a hose along an overhanging branch in a tree in your yard. Turn it on so it drips just barely. Birds will love it. If you have no convenient trees or shrubs in your yard to hang a hose on, poke a nail hole through the bottom of a pail, then thread a short cotton rope or cloth through the hole. It will act as a wick. Hang the bucket over your pond and fill the bucket daily with water.

Run a hose from a rain barrel that has collected from the downspouts. That water can be run through a rain garden and into the pond or garden.

Butterflies in winter

Butterflies need water as well and can get it from water collected in rocks or other depressions in the ground Put a few rocks and sticks in that shallow depression for perching. You can fill a bowl of wet sand near your pond: Butterflies will love you.

Our amphibious friends

If your pond is situated below the frost line, it will not freeze solid in the winter. Fish, bullfrog, Green frog, leopard frog, and turtles require permanent water, so they can live if a hole is left in the ice.

If you have standing water in your yard, plant water rushes in it. Plant cattails if it is deep enough.

Only insect eggs can withstand freezing. Toads must burrow into loose soils, so they can get below the frost line and they would love leaf litter, a yard deep, thank you very much. It will stay frost free throughout the winter in the coldest of climates

Bullfrogs, green frogs and leopard frogs stay in water over the winter but don't forget to keep a hole open in the ice on the pond, so poisonous gases can escape and oxygen can get in the pond so our friends can breathe.

It is best to protect the wetlands we have, but since we are failing miserably at that and have destroyed 80% of our wetlands, the best we can do now is have ponds in our yards, so wildlife can have a place to eat and live.

Please think about turning your yard into a wildlife habitat whether officially through the National Wildlife Habitat organization. Click here to find out how: http://www.nwf.org/backyard/ or just do it because it's the right thing to do.

~Jan Goldfield