Wildlife in the garden: decide which creatures you wish to attract and provide habitat specifically for them when planning your landscape - includes tips on the behavior of birds, squirrels, chipmunks, deer, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, butterflies, moths, insects, toads, snakes, bats, moles and mice

Flower & Garden Magazine, Oct-Nov, 1993 by Donna Bickley

A Chipmunk, Its Cheeks Puffed with stores for a long winter zips past me as I relax on our front porch stoop. The timid creature disappears down a hidden hole under the holly tree in our entryway.

A red fox is briefly spotlighted by my headlights as I pull into our driveway after a late night at the office.

The 5-foot wingspan of a red-shouldered hawk looms before me as I gaze out the window at the bird feeder station on our living room balcony. Digging his talons into the hunk of suet loosely attached to the railing, the hawk tears at it with his beak, swallowing long, fatty strips, his wings swaying to maintain his balance.

The next spring, the hawk and his mate nest in a tall hickory tree 100 yards from our back deck. They rear three youngsters; their cree, cree, cree echoes through our woodlot until the fledglings fly in late spring.

Our 1.9-acre yard, near a Maryland watershed, has evolved into an island of wildlife amid a sea of neatly manicured lawns. It began, with a less noble purpose, as my husband and I converted our lawn into gardens for vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers. As our gardens expanded, so did the list of wildlife visiting them: birds (35 types at last count), butterflies, moths, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, rabbits and other creatures.

Although we grow enough plant life to share with our resident wildlife, we're not especially thrilled with the small herd of white-tailed deer that insists on munching all of the leaves from our single mountain laurel shrub (it has yet to bloom) and that grazed on the tops of our carrots and parsnips last summer. We aren't particularly happy to find a groundhog hole in the tomato bed, but we'll cope with that one too. The rewards of wildlife in the garden far outweigh the liabilities.

BIRDS

We started feeding the birds in a modest manner from a wood-and-glass feeder attached to the top rail of our living room balcony. That particular bird feeder lasted about three days, until I returned home to find a gray squirrel seated inside the feeder, immersed in seed, peering back at me through the glass as it munched on the tender morsels.

We tried hanging bird feeders. The seed kept disappearing, and tooth marks appeared on the metal guards protecting the seed slots. One day, we sat in wait. A squirrel perched on the balcony railing, cocking its head from side to side, calculating the length and angle of leap required to reach the hanging feeders.

Determined to find a way to feed the birds without also feeding the squirrels, we bought feeders of infinite style and complexity. We returned them. We hung feeders from brackets. We greased the poles. As the score reached "squirrels 10, humans 0," we converted entirely to all-metal feeders with weight-sensitive perches that close down if too much weight is placed on them.

Be aware (we learned the hard way) that squirrels eat suet -- or at least run away with it. It doesn't seem to be the squirrels' favorite snack, but it does pay to place suet for the birds in a metal, cagelike suet holder.

It's not necessary to provide feeding stations to attract birds -- a feeding station merely ensures that the birds will congregate in a place where they can be observed. Another way to attract birds is with plants that produce edible seeds or fruits.

We are fortunate to have a lot that features huge tuliptrees (Liriodendron tulipifera). We first see hummingbirds and butterflies, sipping from the bright lime green, yellow and orange blooms; later the seeds provide food for nut-eaters. We also inherited many flowering dogwood trees (Cornus florida) that sport bright crimson berries in the fall. The fruit-eaters, like cardinals and mockingbirds, love them (as do the squirrels). Within two weeks of their ripening, the berries are gone.

We chose berry-producing shrubs like cotoneaster, pyracantha and barberry to landscape our yard. We gave our lone female holly a mate, enabling it to produce hundreds of berries. In early spring, mockingbirds, wrens and catbirds devour the remaining berries from these shrubs before the newly formed fruits of the season are available. We trained a wild Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) across the back of our deck railing, a spot where we can observe the birds enjoying this scrambling plant's blue-black berries.

The fruits on the uppermost branches of our |Whitney' crabapple tree are left for our resident mockingbird -- we don't want to risk our necks for them anyway. Blue jays help themselves to our bountiful crops of greengage plums. Even with only one bite out of each plum, the bird-pecked fruits are outnumbered by the unblemished ones, and we have plenty.

We grow berries: strawberries, gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries and currants. Birds love berries of all kinds, but we have discovered that, like people, birds often prefer the familiar. They find strawberries, blueberries and raspberries very quickly. After the first year, we tired of holes pecked in each strawberry, and learned to cover these fruits with netting. Now the only strawberries that are attacked are the ones at the edge of the strawberry pyramid where the netting doesn't quite reach the ground. Netting is awkward to use on briars, but we cover our black and red raspberries anyway, because we want a lush harvest.