My wife, Holly, and I have been aware of the Backyard Wildlife Certification for some years now. Because we’ve always kept a quite hectic performing schedule, we’ve not been home much over the past few years. With COVID-19, we are finding ourselves with more time on our hands, and decided to start getting our yard ready for certification.
Administered by the National Wildlife Federation, your yard has to meet 5 criteria for certification….food, water, cover, places to raise young, and you have to practice sustainable practices—recycling, composting, etc.
We’ve always been avid bird and wildlife watchers/feeders, so we were off to a head start in the certification process.
Food We try to provide both human assisted (bird feeders) and natural food sources for the animals. Here are a couple of pictures of our back and front yard feeding stations, for human assisted food. In addition we have natural flowering plants and also clover, which provides natural feeding sources.
In addition, we have flowering plants that provide natural food.
Water We have container water gardens in both the front and back yard. These provide water sources for the birds and animals, and we’re finding them used much more for bathing than I anticipated!
Cover/Places to raise young We have a number of shrubs, mature trees, and more that provide natural cover and places to raise their young.
Sustainable practices We both recycle and compost. We have been using the natural compost as food for flower beds, etc.
Well, there you have it, a quick tour of our yard ready for certification. It’s really a pretty simple process, and if you look around your yard, you might well find that you’ve already got some elements in place. If you’re interested in getting your yard certified, you can follow this link to start the process.
Before I sign off, I’ll leave you with a few pictures of what we’ve spotted in our yard!
