Wildlife friendly yard - how friendly is too friendly?

It was a very nice morning.  TPP walked out to take a glance at the kitchen garden. In that short distance, a rabbit, a chipmunk, a squirrel, and several birds crossed his path.  Moments earlier the view from the bathroom window (a most excellent view) featured a very large, well-fed ground hog (whistlepig, woodchuck, Marmota monax).  Unfortunately, a well-fed ground hog is not a good thing for gardens, so this latter wildlife denizen may get relocated to a friendlier location.  The kitty girls are in love with the idea of chipmunks as playthings, but this will not happen as one of the reasons our gardens are wildlife friendly is that the cats are house cats (one is occasionally walked about on a leash).  All three (four) of our local swallowtail butterflies (black, tiger, giant, and probably spicebush too)  were hovering around Mrs. Phactor's perennial bed.  However, members of the rue family (notably Citrus), are the host trees for the larvae of the giant swallowtail (bird-dropping camouflaged), and they are generally in short supply here in north central USA. This is our largest butterfly.  The spicebush swallowtail has become more common because it's food plant does grow in our gardens.  It looks a great deal like the black swallowtail, but with less yellow and more blue on its lower wings especially.  Also happy to see some monarchs flitting about, although milkweeds have not been particularly successful in our gardens for reasons unknown.  

Cagey response for a wildlife friendly garden

The Phactors have a large, urban garden that contains not only a surpising amount of plant diversity, but also the sort of food, shelter, and water that attracts wildlife. For the most part things are amicable. Just 10 days ago, winterberry was a featured plant showing fall color; the berries are now all gone having been transformed into wildlife fodder. Fine, although if the display had lasted longer that would have been fine too. Sigh. In another quick change, a witch hazel went from fall color to flowering in 2 weeks. However one component of our garden's wildlife does not really play well with our plants during the winter: bunnies. In the dead of winter, the bunnies turn to browsing, and our shrubs' and trees' bark bear the evidence. When heavy snow filled the privet hedge, the bunnies gnawed all the bark off the stems from 18 to 24 inches and up, and yes, girdling stems did kill the plant above. Without the snow pack shoveled from the driveway to clamber on, bunnies can't reach the younger, gnawable bark. The bunnies also crop the beauty berry bushes back to 12-18 inches every year. In these cases the hedge needed re-juvenating and a heavy pruning back to 12-16 inches did the trick, and the beautyberry flowers and fruits on new wood, so it should be pruned back each spring anyways. However, in many other cases the outcome is not so good when you find a pricey new shrub gnawed back to the ground. Last winter a cage tipped over and a Korean azalea, a very hardy and most excellent plant (R. mucronulatum) got eaten back to the ground, but fortunately their ability to recover is quite amazing and it may even flower a little if the cage stays in place this winter. So yesterday, the Phactors spent a most excellent November afternoon moving relatively unabtrusive wire cages from herbaceous perennials to trees and shrubs for the winter. And so the cycle of cages goes from herbaceous perennials in the spring and summer to trees and shrubs for the winter. Also for some reason the cost and desireability of any particular plant is directly correlated with its tastiness to bunnies, or so it seems. Eventually most trees develop heavy enough bark as the get larger, but shrubs remain more vulnerable. Run-of-the-garden hostas, meh, but fancy new variety of hosta and it'll be rabbit salad by morning. Just wish the top predator component of wildlife were a bit more common to balance out the herbivores. Great opportunity for red fox, and the year our garden was visited regularly, the bunny problem was minimal although a few partial corpses had to be disposed of.

Wild life? OK, so why is it just animals?

Apparently the Wildlife Photography of the year contest is only open to people who suffer from plant blindness.  Plants apparently are neither wild nor alive. Maybe these guys used to work for the Department of Natural Resources here in Lincolnland who told TPP's academic counterpart that the wild life preservation grant program wasn't going to fund any grants to preserve tall grass prairie because native plants aren't wildlife!  Even though there's less than 1% of the prairie left in our state, and where do you suppose the REAL wildlife, you know prairie chickens, prairie dogs, etc. used to live?  Nonetheless some of the photos are amazing, especially the penguins and blue ice. 

Planting, re-planting, re-re-planting

Dear garden denizens, please allow me to explain.  For gardeners and farmers, planting is a hopeful, optimistic activity.  The outcome of those small beginnings captures our imagination so the effort seems well justified.  It would seem this effort is anticipated by yourselves as well.  But this has been one of those years, when because of the weather, seeds and plants have not jumped off to a great start, instead little plants have stayed just the right snack size to be you meals.  Now that brings us to May, and the necessity of re-planting.  Re-planting is not optimistic, it's pragmatic.  Re-plant or you get nothing.  Re-plant because a short season is better than no season.  So we do it with a certain fatalistic resignation that there just isn't anything else to do.  This brings us to June and the realization that some things are going to need re-re-planting because our wildlife friendly yard is just too damned friendly.  TPP's attitude about re-re-planting is pretty ugly; it generates a deep deep resentment where you think about declaring war on your friendly wildlife.  One woodchuck has been relocated.  Four possums caught up in the sweep by accident were encouraged to move along anyways.  Four possums at once, a one trap record that some claim should be nullified because it wasn't that you caught 4, but that you caught a mother with 3 pups aboard. Whatever.  It's still a record.  Another woodchuck is being far more difficult, a wary, careful, well-fed beast with the audacity to dig beneath the garden shed!  Please understand this is a woodchuck relocation program, not a death sentence.  So dear bunny, the one that ate that row of impatiens this morning for their breakfast, things may get considerably less friendly.  The next pepper plant to disappear will not be taken with a resigned shrug.  Just remember, re-re-planting generates an ugly mood, and we're only human.  Yours, TPP.

This is war! Seriously! Bunnies beware!

"You don't tug on superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask from the old long ranger" and you don't mess around with Mrs. Phactor by sitting there outside the breakfast nook window and eating her fancy tulips.  So let this be a warning to all lagomorph rodents, Mrs. Phactor all riled up is not someone to be trifled with.  By the time you had finished your tulip entree she was looking in the adverts to see if any "retired" greyhounds were available, you know, dogs with a name like Zap, or Flash, or Zip, or Bullet, or Death to Rabbits.  Yes, it's bad enough that you consume her flowers in her absence, but to sit there in full view and eat a bouquet of her tulips for breakfast, oh, that's a brazen bunny.  It's hard to get higher on the garden hit list than squirrels, but the bunnies this year are giving it a real go.  And TPP hasn't told her about the row of tulips you polished off behind the garden shed yet.  That could be the last straw.  Our wildlife friendly garden might become a bit less friendly.  Obviously the top predators are not doing their job, and need some help.  The joys of seeing a fox in the yard almost daily seem like such distant history (3 years ago), and the red-tailed hawks have not been seen now for a week.  Is someone out there offering them a better deal?  Nothing, nothing is better than tulip-fattened rabbit.  Top predators may send their applications to TPP.  We have immediate openings. 

Eradicat in New Zealand

Eradicat?  Eradicate cats?  In New Zealand?  In one sense this fellow is right.  Cats are hard wired to hunt and kill anything furry or feathery thing they can get their paws on.  And they are very good at it.  This can and does harm wildlife.  While all of this is true, it still does not follow that the solution is to eradicate cats.  Clearly this fellow likes a good suck-up pet like a dog, but that's on him.  The Phactors have a wildlife friendly yard: plant cover, water, food, and yes, every now and then some wildlife must be relocated because in general woodchucks exceed our yard's carrying capacity.  But our kitty girls don't harm any wildlife even though they dearly would like to.  The reason cats harm wildlife is because of irresponsible owners.  One, cats are pets, and all the best people have them.  Two, as pets as opposed to purposeful breeding stock, they should be neutered.  Three, cats should be indoor animals unless supervised.  The idea that it's cruel or mean to keep cats inside (incarcerate?) is pure BS.  Our kitties only venture out of doors when harnessed and attached to a long lead, or like the F1 who has a tall fenced yard and a lazy cat.  Let's face it, you really can't walk a cat, but you can let a cat prowl around, explore, and get some exercise without turning them loose.  Would you turn a 5 year old loose in a big box store?  Of course not, to do so is irresponsible.  Even still every so often a squirrel with lower IQ or a less attentive attitude, neither good for survival, has come close to letting our mightiest hunter get her paws on them and improve the local gene pool.  So far it's only been good clean fun allowing both parties some exercise.  We can agree with the concept of eradicat by eliminating the circumstances that allow them to go feral.   

Marmot hits the salad reset button

One of the great thing about having a spacious estate is that it is attractive to wild life, and this is also a problem, a two seasonal problem.  During the winter, rabbits rather indiscriminately prune any trees or shrubs to which they have access, and each year hundreds of feet of fencing are  deployed to establish no bark/twig-eating zones with varying degrees of success (this year - poor Kerria, but look, the flowering quince is recovering from last year).   Then comes spring, and rabbits get better fodder in other places.  Each year, actually several times each year, a woodchuck sets up residence either under the garden shed or the pavilion, and they are such nice animals, really, but their appetites are beyond the ability of small gardens to provide, especially early in the season.  Later in the season they may be content to simply strip all the tasty leaves off your okra (they really like okra) or squash vines, or eat all your parsley (they love parsley; leaves their breath so fresh), but early in the season, the plants are small with limited amounts of biomass.  So all of our just-getting-nicely-established broccoli and bib lettuce seedlings provided a rather small salad the other night.  Of course this is still earlier in the season than such seedlings are usually planted, but such gluttony always proves to be a tad annoying, especially since the seedling bed was protected by some garden fencing.  Maybe Mrs. Phactor will now allow me to revisit plans for a mine field.  

In praise of chiggers

Actually noting good can be said of chiggers (trombiculid mites). This year's hot, dry weather has been very good for the chigger population, and while you might think that any botanist who wades around in thick prairie vegetation is just asking for an infestation, the prairie has been quite benign posing no problem. But our yard this year has been its worst in memory. Every journey into our gardens for herbs, flowers, or garden produce, even just a cocktail hour walk around, has produced another batch of red, itchy welts. The Queensland Australia version,scrub itch, plagued my rainforest research, but it wasn't the rainforest per se but any scruffy, weedy margins where the mites were encountered. Under usual conditions, Ms. Phactor, being the tastier, would collect chigger wounds, while leaving me untouched, but for reasons not clear, certainly not a question of my tastiness improving, this season we have been on a par although not actually keeping exact score. This is what you get for having a wildlife friendly yard. And invariably your worst itching chigger wounds are on those parts of your anatomy that you cannot scratch in public.

Wildlife friendly yard bites back

You do everything you can to make wildlife happy in your yard, except to let them eat my tomatoes, a crime punished by banishment, and then some, or in this case, just one species of wildlife makes your life miserable. Chiggers were a personal discovery in 1971 after having moved to the hotter, dryer midwest for graduate school. They were not a problem in upstate NY. The hot, dry weather has produced a sizeable population and each and every time the Phactor ventures outside, to water, to guard his tomatoes, to enjoy the evening, to see the pond progress, or lack thereof, the next morning new red, itchy chigger welts are found, and generally in either very uncomfortable or very embarrassing places. Mosquito repellants work to some degree, and perhaps the attacks upon my personal temple would be more numerous without its use, but who wants to do that experiment? The strangest thing of all is that Mrs. Phactor is usually a chigger magnet, while the Phactor is ignored a situation she has attributed to my being a distasteful person, but this summer it's quite the reverse. And that is the worst thing about it. Who said they could change the rules?

Wildlife friendly yard to a point

My wife and I own a most excellent property, a big park-like yard right in the middle of our city. Properties like ours are rare, especially when their fate is usually to be subdivided and developed. Indeed, the former owner worried that an unscrupulous buyer would take advantage of a buildable lot to make a quick buck. Our goal is to garden.

Our yard is certified friendly to wildlife, and indeed many animals live in and stop by. Night before last we watched a little red bat swooping over our lily pond to grab drinks of water. The birds are certainly a constant delight. But there are times when my love of wildlife wears a bit thin in the rodent department. The rabbits are a bit annoying, but the fox squirrels and woodchucks can be a downright pain.

My early kitchen garden was coming along quite nicely: spinach, lettuces, broccoli, snap peas, scallions. And they were fenced to keep the rabbits at bay. But a woodchuck pushed under the fence and made quite a nice feast of our early garden. Small gardens only provide a modest meal for such gluttons, and here I publically declare war. Live and let live extends only as far as the boundaries of my garden. I cannot say how it will be done, but with some luck and our superior intellect, a truce will be reached whereby the garden goodies will be eaten by the people raising them and a woodchuck will continue their life of plant consumption elsewhere, a distant elsewhere.

I'm all for ecology within limits. So let this be a warning to the squirrels. A repeat of last year's consumption of every single strawberry long before they were ripe will have severe reprecussions. You've been warned. Exile awaits.