For those of you who are following us, you know that yesterday my son and I started to create a wildlife habitat in our backyard, following the guidelines set by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Yesterday our focus was on providing food sources for wildlife. Today, we worked on step two… supply water for wildlife.
Certification requires that the backyard provide one water source, selected from the following list:
- Lakefront
- Seasonal Pond
- Coastal
- Birdbath
- Water Garden / Pond
- Rain Garden
- Lake
- River / Stream
- Spring
- Shallow Dish
- Puddling Area
In the past, providing water in our yard for wildlife wasn’t something I thought about. Actually, my focus was on emptying out any little bit of pooled water I could find, as I don’t want any mosquitoes breeding in the yard. Also, there is a natural spring just on the other side of our fence, which is primarily what attracts wildlife near our home.
But for our actual backyard to be a wildlife habitat, we need to have a water source IN our yard. We already have a birdbath in the yard, but I’ve had it disassembled, so it won’t fill with water when it rains. Already having the birdbath made this an easy project. We simply reassembled it, tucked it into the corner of our yard, and filled with water. To prevent mosquitoes, we’ll dump the water out and refill with fresh water daily.
My son was so excited this afternoon when a blue jay actually drank some water from the birdbath. His joyous exclamations, “There’s a bird in the birdbath, there’s a bird in the birdbath, there’s a bird in the birdbath!!!” made the project feel like a success. And it was… we already had a visitor!
Related articles
- Creating Our Backyard Wildlife Habitat: Step One, Provide Food (anaturemom.com)
- Creating our Backyard Wildlife Habitat: Step Three, Create Cover (anaturemom.com)
- Creating our Backyard Wildlife Habitat: Step Four, Homes for Wildlife (anaturemom.com)
- Bring Wildlife to Your Home – Create a Backyard Wildlife Habitat (anaturemom.com)
hike.wander.wonder 
Reblogged this on Serenity Spell and commented:
Step 2 in the guidelines set forth by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), in the creation of a backyard wildlife habitat: Supply Water!
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I’ve got a couple of old satellite dishes that I’m going to try and recycle into some bird baths. Love the progress on your habitat. Have fun.
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Great idea!
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You inspired us. I am working on our backyard with my daughters.
They are so excited…
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Great to hear! It’s sweet how much little ones enjoy helping the animals. For two days now, my son has been asking repeatedly, “what else can we do in the garden?”
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How wonderful! What a cool idea! I wish we could do something along these lines but living in the city makes it a little trickier. We have lots of raccoons and opossums that wreak havoc, and the squirrels are the worst.
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It’s a bit tough for us, too. I’m doing my best with our small town home yard, and trying to put things out of reach of the squirrels, raccoons, and rats. They certainly don’t seem to need our help!
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Lovely post! It’s so much fun to watch the birds actually “bathe” in the bath. 🙂
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I’ll look forward to that!
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