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The Big Backyard
If you have a big backyard in a rural residential area or your backyard extends into larger acreage you have the opportunity to create and manage much larger and more diverse wildlife habitat and resources.
Your landscape design and planting in the big backyard may involve a bushland rehabilitation or revegetation project and can include the planting and management of wildlife corridors, vegetation buffers, riparian zones, waterways and farm dams (big frog ponds).
Areas around houses and buildings on larger properties can also incorporate any of the design and habitat features recommended for smaller backyards, such as landscaping with local native plants, building frog ponds and including bird baths and water sources around your backyard or garden area.
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Useful Tips and Facts
- Create urban wildlife corridors and stepping stones to larger local bushland or parkland areas.
- In nature there is no such thing as waste everything is linked and contributes to the cycle. As a plant reaches the end of its life cycle it is not discarded by nature, instead it provides habitat for animals and food for micro-organisms as it lies on the ground, the waste from the micro-organisms, bacteria and fungi feeding on it replace nutrients and organic material to the soil for new plants to grow.
- Plant local native species
- The best way to attract native wildlife to your backyard is to provide a variety of healthy natural foods in the form of seeds, leaves, flowers, nectar, pollen, fruits and nuts throughout the year.
- The use of pesticides and herbicides can damage your soils and kill non target species. The poisoning of insects with chemicals can also cause larger species relying on those insects as a food source to become sick or even die from eating poisoned insects.
- To create habitat for smaller native birds you can grow shrubs close together to create dense corners or pockets in your garden which will provide protection and refuge from larger aggressive birds such as noisy miners
- Wattles (Acacias). While most wattles only live between 6 - 10 years, they are an important pioneer species which colonise disturbed areas, where other plants find it hard to grow. They improve soil conditions enough to allow other species to germinate and thrive by fixing nitrogen into the soil through their roots and adding high levels of organic leaf litter.