How to Help Wildlife This Winter in Your Own Yard

By Jennifer McGuire Cox

With winter fast approaching, here are some easy tips to create a wildlife-friendly yard!

Leave the leaves. You can help wildlife, and save yourself a lot of effort, by keeping the leaves in your yard where they are. Not only do they eventually break down and enrich your soil, but leaves also provide habitat for a lot of animals. Insects, worms, snails, salamanders, and even some bats often wait out winter in leaf litter. Birds and other insects also forage in leaf litter for food over the cold winter months. If you don’t want to leave your whole yard covered in leaves over the winter, you can also rake them to your garden beds or just a portion of your yard.
Keep that Christmas tree. Instead of putting your old and dying Christmas tree to the curb after the holidays, why not put it in a corner of your yard? This provides shelter for birds during the cold winter months as well as a place to protect them from predators. Not only can birds use the shelter, but other wildlife can take advantage as well. If you don’t want to put a whole tree in your backyard, gather some large branches and tree limbs that fall in your yard and put them together in a brush pile. This will have the same effect!
Put out a feeder. The hardest time for birds to find food is winter. If you don’t want to commit to putting a feeder out all year round, the few months of winter is the most critical time to do so. While the different types of seeds and feeders can be overwhelming, sunflower seeds generally give you the most “bang for your buck,” attracting the most number of bird species. Suet cakes — a solid mix of fats along with seeds, grains, and other ingredients (see recipe below) — are also great for helping birds gain fat reserves during the winter.
Keep those seeds. It’s tempting when you’re preparing your garden for the winter to clean up by cutting or pulling dying plants and flowers. Instead, keep those stems, and the seeds that are on them, for the birds. Native wildflowers — including black-eyed Susans and coneflowers — are an important food source, as are several native grasses. Insect larvae, another important food source for birds during the winter months, can also be found on dead plants.
Don’t forget water, too. Birds and other animals still need to drink. With temperatures below freezing during the winter months, having fresh water on hand is important. If you already have a bird bath, don’t drain it for the winter but invest instead in a battery or solar-powered water heater to put in your bird bath to keep that water flowing. Putting water in a sunny place will also help.

Suet Sources

Suet is animal fat that has been rendered to form hard cakes, balls, or other shapes. There are several ways to acquire different types of animal fat for making your own cakes, and many birders have one method that is easiest or preferred for them. You can try different methods to find the type of fat that is most popular with your backyard birds as well as best for your bird feeding budget.

Purchase rendered plain suet cakes or chunks from a wild bird supply store, garden center, or pet store. These cakes can be used as-is or can be melted down to be used in more specialized suet recipes. This will usually be the most expensive option, as these cakes have already been processed and shaped for feeders.
Purchase suet or beef fat trimmings from a local butcher. This is a less expensive option and, depending on your butcher, you may be able to have these scraps for a drastic discount or even for free. Also consider asking beef farmers or anyone who may butcher cattle about fat trimmings for sale.
Save bacon and pork meat drippings to create your own suet. This will be softer than rendered beef fat but is still suitable for the birds as a rare treat. Do not feed birds exclusively bacon drippings, however, since some compounds from that type of fried fat could be detrimental to birds in the long term. Furthermore, excessive salt in these drippings may also be harmful, though more study is needed to determine how much salt birds can ingest safely.
Buy lard at the grocery store. Lard is typically found shelved near the butter or margarine products and can be used the same way as plain suet, though it will be somewhat softer and may melt more easily on hot days.
Buy vegetable shortening in place of animal fat. This is a preferred choice for many vegan or vegetarian birders who prefer not to use animal products, and it is still suitable for the birds. Vegetable shortening is typically found with baking supplies.

Recipe Source

Make Your Own Suet

Ingredients:
1 cup rendered suet (beef fat)
1 cup chunky peanut butter
3 cups ground cornmeal
1/2 cup white or wheat flour

Melt the suet and peanut butter together until they are smooth and liquid. Add the cornmeal and flour, mixing well. (These ingredients will make the suet more crumbly and easier for birds to eat, as well as less messy in the yard.) Allow the mixture to cool slightly to thicken, then pour it into molds or containers to use. Refrigerate or freeze suet until it is firm and you are ready to use it. Extra suet may be kept frozen until needed. [Recipe from ‘The Spruce’]
[Note: Suet may be obtained from the meat department at local grocery stores.]

[Jennifer McGuire Cox is a naturalist at Brookside Nature Center, Maydale Conservation Park, and Croydon Creek Nature Center. She is also a certified Maryland Master Naturalist. She lives on Belton Road.] ■