Part of not having a job or school schedule (which should be relatively temporary) means that, occasionally, you get so caught up in something you’re doing that you forget to go to bed. That happened a few times recently, and so I wound up catching a couple of shows on TV that I never would have seen otherwise. One that really piqued my interest was Backyard Habitat on the Animal Planet channel. (It comes on at 8 am, when there is nothing on every other channel but news, C-SPAN, home shopping channels, and paid programming. Horror of horrors, there’s nothing but infomercials even on the SciFi Channel at that hour!)

So what I learned is that the National Wildlife Federation, an organization of which Geoffrey & I have been longtime supporters, has a wonderful program called the Backyard Wildlife Habitat. You don’t have to even have an actual backyard - any spot will do, from an apartment balcony to a schoolyard to a community garden, as long as you (or your group) are the primary caretaker of that space. I have a medium-sized back patio and a good-sized second-floor balcony. And there’s about a 1/4-acre of side yard that is nominally mine, since I have the end unit furthest from the street in my townhouse complex, and nobody really goes into that side yard but critters anyway.

Getting your habitat organized and certified is easy - all you have to do is ensure that the area has available food, water, cover/shelter, and places to raise young for critters of any kind, and that you practice some kind of sustainable gardening and/or land management that helps protect wildlife (such as eliminating chemical pesticides & fertilizers, using a soaker hose for watering, removing non-native vegetation, and keeping cats indoors), fill out the certification application (online or download the .pdf file & mail it in), and send the $15 fee. Once your application is approved, they send you a Backyard Wildlife Habitat certificate suitable for framing, and you also get a free one-year membership to the National Wildlife Federation including a year of their magazine. Once you’re certified, you’re also eligible to purchase & post a really cool Backyard Wildlife Habitat yard sign.

I already feed the birds & squirrels, and practice several of the items on the land management list, and there’s plenty of cover in my side yard (due to a mini-thicket of small downed trees & bramble bushes), so actually all I need to do to get my yard certified is get a birdbath and tidy up the place (I’ve noticed previous tenants left some minor garbage - a ripped screen door, a broken fan, etc - in the side yard, which I can toss in the dumpster). It’s such a neat program, and a great incentive to not only tidy up the space right outside my home, but do something good for the critters in the process!