How to Keep Your Backyard Wildlife Safe

February 12, 2025

By: Steve Dishman, Interpreter

Viewing wildlife at your Metroparks is a wonderful experience and one that many visitors take advantage of with cameras and binoculars. But you can find diverse wildlife in your own backyard, too. There are many actions that we can take in our parks as well as our backyards to not only encourage wildlife, but keep them safe and healthy, too.

Backyard chemicals

Targeted applications of soapy water or vinegar can dramatically reduce pest insects in the garden without having impacts on other wildlife, including pollinators.

Reducing the use of chemical pesticides can be a big help to wildlife. Pesticides may reduce pest damage on gardens, but often come with harmful side effects on other, non-target species. Insecticides can be harmful if ingested by larger animals as well, including pets and children. Safe storage, careful application, and managing spills can all go a long way to minimizing impacts. Even minimizing the use of road salts on driveways and sidewalks can help to keep wildlife safe by keeping excess salts out of waterways.

Thankfully, there are several natural alternatives to chemical pesticides.

Using a vinegar and soap mixture can help to eliminate weeds, particularly in sidewalks and patios. Neem oil, which comes from the Southeast Asian neem tree, when mixed in a water solution is deadly to pests but harmless to butterflies, bees, and vertebrates. A third example is peppermint oil, which can be used to deter harmful insects and rodents. “Trap crops” can be planted to attract pest insects and lure them from garden plants. Learning to live with some insect-holes in leaves, stems, and flowers can also be a part of welcoming wildlife. And consider adding a bird house. Common bird house nesters, including eastern bluebirds, will happily eat garden pests.

Adding a birdhouse that attracts eastern bluebirds can be a great way to naturally reduce pests in the garden!

Backyards for Birds

Another way to keep your backyard wildlife safe involves birds. Bird feeders can be a wonderful way to view wildlife from your home, but an unexpected hazard arises from windows. A bird might mistake a window as a flyway and crash into it, which can be lethal. Purchasing an inexpensive set of evenly spaced window dots (or other patterns) has been shown to drastically reduce the amount of bird and window collisions. Other techniques you can use to help backyard birds include moving feeders and bird baths further away from windows (30 ft) or even closer to windows to reduce the impact of strikes. You can even leave bug screens up all year which can cushion the impact of a bird flying into the window.

Windows, with their clear glass surfaces, create hazards for birds in flight. Products, like these dots on the windows at Lake St Clair Metropark Nature Center, make the windows visible to birds instead of a collision hazard.

Above all, the best way to keep backyard wildlife is to keep them wild. Simple things like securing your garbage, knowing where animals may be nesting to avoid lawn cutting in those spots, keeping pets away from potential nest spots, and giving a clean water source, especially on muggy summer days, can ensure your backyard is a safe spot for wildlife to use. And of course, view the wildlife from a safe distance! It is much better to have native vegetation and food sources for wildlife than handfeeding them. We hope these tips can help to make your backyard a haven for all sorts of wildlife!

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