I meant starlings and sparrows, non-native species that eat fruit in the orchard. They are unprotected birds in New Hampshire. They also breed all out of proportion to other birds and compete with the native birds. Starlings and chipmunks attack fruit trees which in my opinion makes it worse than a groundhog eating some lettuce, because it took me 6 years to grow those fruit trees before they produced a crop. Orchards are not like tossing out a few lettuce seeds and you get back heads of lettuce in 60 days. They nibble ten Asian pears and I am out twenty bucks. Chipmunks also eat tomatoes. Groundhogs too though I don't have any this year. Thank goodness groundhogs cannot climb trees.

I've never seen as much effect on wildlife due to plant selection as I have with garden practices. Most any flowering plant attracts nectar/pollen collectors, but beyond that... Leaving leaf litter/seed pods under trees creates a habitat for bugs, from bacteria on up to the larger bugs which birds and lizards eat. Basically composting in place and the birds turn the compost for you. Adding water like Toucan said, but water features specifically for wildlife. Like a shallow pan for bird bathing in addition to drinking. That will also provide water for other creatures. Birds don't like cover near the water where cats can hide but they do like branches nearby where they can stage and check for predators before moving to the water. And also water in the landscape. Some higher water plants means moist ground, more insects, more food for wildlife. True desert landscapes don't generate a like of life compared to when water is added. Rocks/rock piles for lizards, crickets and other bugs. Add some wood in there and some plants on top with added water and you have a good insect producer. Shade I think increases insect production and therefore wildlife. These things are more a all year. more wildlife type thing. A plant that generates berries for example provide a really short window of food for wildlife while habitat is an all year type thing.

I hear ya about the irony. Native....or non-native when the native animal/insect population is drawn to them equally. Last spring I bought a small (12 inches tall!) wafer ash (Ptelea trifoliata) at a wildflower sale to attract giant swallowtail caterpillars one day. Well, one momma GST did find my wafer ash and soon I had 6 ravenous caterpillars. GST caterpillars feed on plants in the Rutaceae family which, when it comes to natives, would include prickly ash and wafer ash....both trees that are impossible to find at any local nursery. Prickly ash is probably something most homeowners remove anyway. So how on earth do those butterflies manage to stay alive in the midwest? They will eat citrus leaves (a tropical....not something you would find in the midwest...although Poncirus trifoliata survives in this zone). They will eat rue...an herb from Europe! Luckily I had a hardy orange for them to chomp on when they ate all the leaves off the wafer ash. But then they disappeared....I'm thinking a 'possum got them overnight or something. :-/ They had been wandering off once the wafer ash was leafless but they were very easy to find when I looked for them and then put them back on the hardy orange. Cycle of life, I guess. But it is ironic that sometimes the non-native plants are the ones that keep the natives going. What I learned...I'm buying more wafer ash for next year since apparently, it is very delicious to GSTs but I am also going to plant rue even though it's not a native because it is a good food source backup for butterflies. Nothing is cut and dry, you know?

Larry, I love the photo. Our deer aren't as thin as yours, but they were that thin, or even worse, last year. Yesterday when Tim came home from getting a haircut he came in with a bag of deer corn and we put some out for the deer this morning. I put the deer corn right by the back compost pile near the deer trail and the deer were there eating it 10 minutes later. It was the same herd that I described in the first post on this thread. They didn't come until about 7:45 a.m. Something is scaring the deer and rabbits because they are becoming very scarce in the evenings, and don't come out in the mornings until well after sunrise. This is a change in their pattern that has occurred within the last week. Yellow Cat, who was a feral cat for a decade before he settled into our place, adopted us and retired from being wild and self-sufficient won't even leave my side right now, and would stay inside the house 24/7 now if I'd let him. When he starts hiding out inside like that, or sticking to me like glue outdoors, that's another sign the predators are getting too close to the house. I haven't seen any or heard any, but we had a coyote hanging around a couple of months ago. Likely it is a coyote that's scaring them. Susan, I've never seen native passionvine on our land nor have I ever seen it anywhere in Love County. It might grow down in the wild river bottom areas, but we've been down there on fires and on drowning searches/recoveries and I've never seen it there either. Remember that we're more of a grassland than woodland type ecoregion, although there are some stretches of woods along the river and along creekbanks. I wish we had native passionvine here. We do always have gulf frits, though, so there's got to be passionvine someplace. My guess would be it is more in the eastern part of our county because the soils there are better and there's more woodlands along the river. I've seen giant, black and spicebush swallowtails this summer, but not very many of any of them. Usually they are as thick as flies, so I really miss having the usual hordes of butterflies around. Carol, That sounds like a great way to shade your pepper plants. As hot and dry as y'all are there, I know they must really appreciate that shade. My peppers wilted a couple of days in June when rain hadn't fallen and we were over 100 degrees but haven't wilted since then. They do get shade from the pecan tree beginning between 2 and 3 p.m. and that seems to be helping keep them happier this year than they were last year. Dawn