On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA June-July 2016 | Page 20
SUSTAINABILITY
NANCY TAYLOR ROBSON
Gardens
as
wildlife
corridors
Part 1, Urban Why we need more
wildlife friendly gardens
In the next issue of On the QT, look
for Part 2, which examines creating
wildlife corridors on larger properties.
I
DISJOINTED BYWAYS
“Development is segmenting corridors
and green spaces,” says Beth Pratt-Bergstrom, the NFW’s California director. “That
smashes genetic diversity.” A wildlife ‘island’ that isolates a wild population usually
spells its doom, as the isolation causes
each generation to diminish. For example,
there is a group of 15 mountain lions living
in the Santa Monica, California, hills that
can’t safely get out to seek new mates.
One young male was hit and killed last year
while trying to leave. While we may not
want mountain lions in our back yards, we
do want a healthy, intact food web, which
requires a diversity of wildlife. Plants, particularly native and naturalized plants, play a
huge role in this.
20
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y D AV I D M I Z E J E W S K I .
magine you’re about to cycle cross
country, but there is just one place¬,
say, an obscure town outside Wichita,
Kansas, where you can find food, water
and shelter. That’s akin to what a host
of species, including birds and key
pollinators, face today. Where there once
were flourishing corridors of native and
naturalized plants that provided habitat for
wildlife, there are now fragments hemmed
in by cities, highways, paved urban sprawl
and suburban developments that are
composed primarily of acres of that sterile
monoculture—the lawn.
“Our activities, unfortunately, destroy a
lot of wildlife habitat,” says David Mizejewski, naturalist for the National Wildlife Federation (NFW). Wildlife needs food, water,
cover and a place to raise young. Additionally, it needs connectivity between those
nurturing spaces to be able to migrate
and move from one gene pool to another,
which helps to keep a species healthy and
is critical to its survival.
David Mizejewski’s garden is entirely enclosed, so it isn’t connected to a wildlife corridor (yet). Every
gardener can take similar initial steps toward connectivity and then encourage neighbors to do the same.
His garden includes: a water feature in front of a tomato and hyssop (Agastache spp.). The simple water
container holds pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata), dwarf cattail (Typha minima) and Iris versicolor. Just
to its side is a tiny bog garden of varied pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea); toward the back is Joe Pye
weed (Eutrochium spp.).
Gardens comprised of native and
related plant communities can go a long
way toward meeting the biological needs
of wildlife. The NWF’s wildlife habitat
program encourages recreating habitat
through wildlife friendly gardens, which the
organization will certify. Even a patchwork
of these gardens in a sea of concrete and
lawn benefits wildlife. In 2010, then-graduate student Steffenie Widows visited and
surveyed 50 wildlife-certified homes in
Orlando, Florida, to get a snapshot of the
program’s effectiveness. She discovered
that each garden exhibited a much greater
diversity of wildlife than its non-certified
neighbors. Over the years, the wildlife corridor campaign has been gaining traction,
with more than 300,000 acres of wildlife
habitat in nearly 200,000 gardens nationwide.
“There are about 4,000 people in Los
Angeles, who have signed up,” says
Pratt-Bergstrom. This is a good start, but
it’s the contiguousness of these gardens
that creates a corridor, instead of the equivalent of a waystation.