8 Gifts to Nature
Puddock Hill Journal #36: A gift to nature is the most rewarding of all.
As the year winds to a close I think of the gifts nature bestows upon us at every moment: fresh air, fertile soil, clean water, and the fabric of life that sustains us.
There is another aspect, as difficult to define as the spirit of your favorite holiday: the sense that we are all part of something bigger than us, eternal, perhaps more meaningful.
As a backyard steward, I am taking this moment to reflect on what I have given to nature and what I will continue to give if I maintain the means to do so. So that readers might reflect upon it too, I present these eight gifts as an appeal.
1. Hang birdhouses.
Many bird species evolved to use cavities in old trees as their nesting sites, but with fewer old trees around we must give nature an assist by providing birdhouses. Every fall, I add two or three birdhouses to Puddock Hill. They will provide shelter over winter and stand ready for use whenever the birds feel ready to nest.
In the past, the birdhouses were all suitable for bluebirds and house wrens. With plenty of bluebirds around, this fall I added a chickadee house and a kestrel house. The latter required a bit more effort, as it has to be hung higher off the ground, requiring a ladder.
2. Swear off pesticides.
Despite the promises of manufacturers, pesticides inevitably have an indiscriminate quality to them, rarely only killing the targeted species. In addition, their relative invisibility belies the fact that they don’t stay put. They seep into soil and can migrate to bodies of water.
The main exceptions we have made in the past with regard to pesticide use has been for ants in the house and stinging wasps that build nests in inconvenient places on the house—inside the trash enclosure, say, or under the porch ceiling. This year, we battled persistent ants in the kitchen with bait trays but mainly used natural diatomaceous earth powder and mint oil. We never had to spray any wasp nests.
3. Pledge not to use chemical fertilizers.
Lawns are wastelands unsupportive of biodiversity, so there’s really little point encouraging them. Furthermore, fertilizer often runs off them much more so than from flower beds.
In fifteen years, we have only once fertilized our lawn, and that time we used a natural product. With two ponds on the property, we don’t want excess nitrogen and phosphorous runoff, but even if you don’t have a pond, that runoff usually has a bad effect somewhere. This year, we selectively deployed spot fertilizer on a few shrubs and perennials. Especially where we’re trying to naturalize natives, we hope nature will do the work, and we never fertilize trees.
4. Plant native trees.
Having planted hundreds of native trees over the past two autumns, this year we didn’t bring any trees in, but we transplanted more than a dozen volunteers, as I documented in this post.
Native trees, of course, are best suited to our native arthropods and other animals that have evolved to thrive on their bounty, including many essential but invisible creatures in the earth.
5. Plan to shrink the lawn.
Once I committed to looking for ways to shrink our lawn, I began to find them everywhere. We started with steep slopes and wet areas. Last year, we cut some extensive beds in the middle of the lawn. This year, we continued to nip away at it with our patio renovation and raised-bed garden. Although a bit of that work only swapped lawn for impervious surface, it also involved expanding planting beds and adding natives.
Another way we shrunk the lawn this year was our No Mow May Plus efforts whereby for much of the growing season we stopped mowing areas that probably added up to about an acre. We will reprise that effort in the new year.
6. Use window decals.
According to Audubon, window strikes cause the deaths of a billion birds in the US every year (yes, that’s billion with a B), and half to three-quarters of all bird strikes are fatal.
All the windows in our house have muntins, which I like to think helps the birds to see the windows before collisions occur, but we do have occasional bird strikes. This year, I expanded our use of anti-collision decals.
7. Feed the birds.
There are two ways to feed the birds, and we do both at Puddock Hill. First, we keep bird feeders out all year. This is not strictly necessary for their survival, but it may help.
Of course, we also plant natives that contain fruits and seeds. We leave the seed heads up all winter for the birds to pick at, and the dry plants also give small birds plenty of places to hide from predators.
8. Go electric.
According to EPA, a typical 3.5 horsepower gas mower emits as much pollution as eleven cars. By some estimates, 17 million gallons of gasoline spills each year during the process of refueling mowers, while mowers burn 800 million gallons of gas each year. Gas-powered landscape equipment is noisy and releases greenhouse gases and volatile organic compounds that harm human and animal health.
For these reasons, California has banned gas-powered lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and snow blowers starting in 2024. We should all voluntarily do the same.
At Puddock Hill, I have shifted my personal tools to electric (chainsaw, string trimmer, pole saw, and small leaf blower), and I can attest to how far the technology has come. It’s not perfect, but nothing is, and these tools are far quieter and less harmful than gas-powered ones, especially if you charge them with renewable energy as we do.
I hope soon to persuade Larry, our part-time property manager, who has his own equipment, to switch to commercial electric leaf blowers next year and, at some time in future, to electric mowers, at least while working on our property.
These gifts to nature are not all free, but they will pay dividends for years to come.
Some housekeeping:
This is the last edition of Backyard Stewardship in 2022. Next week, I will donate net proceeds of paid subscriptions to the Xerces Society and take a hiatus from posting, perhaps for a few weeks.
When the newsletter returns, I will begin to mix in some observations on desert landscaping, which I’m learning about at our new part-time home in the California desert. There, too, I consider myself a backyard steward, although our personal canvas is much smaller than in Pennsylvania.
More on all that in the new year.
Eight mallards visited the big pond one afternoon this week. Unfortunately, I usually scare them off even when sticking to the path, but I managed to snap a picture of this pair before they fled:
Happy holidays and a healthy New Year to you and the natural communities at your doorstep!