Planting for Wildlife

One of the best ways to help our local wildlife populations is to enhance habitat on your own property. Wildlife need more than dedicated parks and green spaces to survive and flourish – they require continuous corridors of suitable habitat and open space. Backyard habitat enhancement is a great way to help connect isolated pockets of habitat while also improving the value and aesthetics of your property.

Habitat consists of three basic elements: food, water, and shelter. The following pages detail what you can do to provide all three elements for local birds and other wildlife. The Audubon Society of Portland also conducts occasional workshops for the community on backyard habitat enhancement. Please contact Tom Costello (tcostello@audubonportland.org) for more details.

For an overview of what you can do to in your own back yard, read our pamphlet: For The Birds

To learn more about the habitat value of some of more common native plants, read our Interpretive Guide for Native Plants

Certify your backyard through our Backyard Habitat Certification Program.

The Audubon at Home website is also a great reference the downloadable poster is a great primer on backyard habitat restoration): http://www.audubon.org/bird/at_home/neighborhood/index.html

Learn to build bird nest boxes to provide shelter.

 The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center hosts a website with a lot of great information on native plants and their habitat value: http://wildflower.org/

The Xerces Society has several good references for Backyard Habitat Enhancement: 

Plants for Native Bees in the Pacific Northwest (pdf)

Butterfly Gardening (pdf)

Please visit their website for more information on Native Pollinator Conservation: http://www.xerces.org/