The 4 B’s – Birds, Bees, Bats and Butterflies.
Attracting birds, bats, butterflies and bees to your garden or landscape not only creates a beautiful setting, but also helps our environment. Gardens that are filled with birds and butterflies (even at their munching-caterpillar stage) are filled with life! Birds play an important role in the garden, eating aphids and beetles; bees are important for pollination, and the list goes on and on.
So, how do we attract nature’s beauties to our landscape? It’s simple if we create a friendly habitat. A habitat is a place that provides everything one needs to survive including shelter, water, food, and sunlight.
Shelter: trees and shrubs, deck overhangs, vines growing along a trellis or fence and bird and butterfly houses all provide shelter for wildlife.
Water: bird baths, ponds and water features are the most common ways to provide water but even a shallow dish filled with water and placed in an accessible area can attract both birds and butterflies. Place a few rocks above the water level to give birds and butterflies a place to land.
Sunlight: Butterflies need the warmth of the sun to prepare their wings for flight and birds need it to determine their sleep, reproductive and molting cycles and ultimately their migration cycles. Fortunately, sunlight is probably the easiest achieved addition to any landscape.
Food: Refer to the different topics in our Pollinator section for specific bee, bird, and butterfly attracting plants. You will learn about the need to plant both host and nectar plants.
Some bats such as the Mexican long-nosed and long-tongued bats are important pollinators and seed dispersers. Many of our everyday products, such as tequila, wild bananas, balsa wood and allspice to name a few, come from bat-dependent plants. Texas’s pollinating bats are in far south and far west Texas. Bats “work the night” shift. They tend to enjoy a flower that’s mild in scent and not bright in color. Read more about them in our Pollinator section.
Check out these pages for more info.