Your Yard Is Hosting a Pollinator Airbnb

Your Yard Is Hosting a Pollinator Airbnb

The Leaves You're About to Rake Are Already Spoken For

Hey, it's Courtney, owner of The Birdhouse Chick

The leaves are coming down, and right now I'm doing everything in my power not to spend the next four hours out there with a rake. Every single year, same fight.

Whenever I tell people the next part, I get almost the exact same reaction: "Wait, I didn't know that." Knowing these little backyard tricks is sort of my whole job, so let me pass this one along.

There's a real movement behind it called Leave the Leaves, backed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and here at BHC, we're big fans. Short version: that pile you're eyeing in the corner of your yard isn't trash. It's already got guests checked in.

Bumblebees, butterflies, moths, and my personal favorite, fireflies, all tuck into leaves and brush to make it through the cold. Some butterflies and moths even spend the winter in cocoons that look exactly like a dried leaf.

Come spring, those guests pay you back. More pollinators means your flowers thrive. More bugs means more food for the birds raising babies in your yard, and I mean a lot more food, which we'll get to in a minute.

What's Actually Living in That Pile

I went and dug into exactly who's in there, past what I usually tell people at parties.

Start with mated bumblebee queens. After they mate in late summer, they burrow down only an inch or two into loose soil, and the leaves sitting on top are what keep them insulated enough to survive winter. No leaf layer, no blanket.

Then there are the moths and butterflies, which is honestly my favorite part of this whole story. Luna moths and swallowtail butterflies don't just hide in the leaves, their cocoons and chrysalides are camouflaged to look exactly like a dead leaf. Woolly bear and fritillary caterpillars skip the disguise and just shelter directly in the litter. And the mourning cloak butterfly skips the cocoon stage entirely, it overwinters as a full grown adult tucked into a brush pile, which is why you might spot one flying around on the first warm day in March before almost anything else is out.

And then, fireflies. This one genuinely surprised me the first time I learned it. Most fireflies spend one to two full years as larvae living down in the leaf litter and soil, eating snails and worms, long before they ever light up a summer evening. Bag up your leaves every fall and you might be throwing out next year's light show before it even gets a chance to start. It's not a small thing, either: something like 14% of the roughly 171 firefly species in North America are already considered at risk of disappearing.

Even the birds get in on it directly, not just as beneficiaries. Towhees and ovenbirds forage right in the leaf litter for insects and seeds.

None of this means letting your whole yard go wild. It just means leaving a little bit of leaf litter exactly where it falls.

Why Birds Need Those Bugs, Too

This is the part that ties straight back to why you've got birdhouses and feeders out there in the first place.

Chickadees are the best example I know. Come spring, they basically stop eating the seed at your feeder and switch their babies over to an almost all caterpillar diet. Doug Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, found that one breeding pair of chickadees needs somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 caterpillars to raise a single clutch of chicks. They're doing this from about 6 in the morning until 8 at night, for the full 16 to 18 days it takes the brood to fledge. Do the math and that's several hundred caterpillars a day, hand delivered by two very tired parents.

Chickadees aren't unusual here, either. Most songbirds raise their young on insects instead of seed, caterpillars especially, because they're soft and packed with protein and easy for a baby bird to swallow.

So here's the chain. A yard that gets cleared down to bare dirt every fall has nowhere for those caterpillars and moths and beetles to spend the winter. Fewer of them make it to spring, which means less food on the table right when your birds need it most. One chickadee family going through thousands of caterpillars to raise a single nest isn't an exaggeration. It's just what the job takes.

Eastern towhees take the leaf litter connection even further, they forage right in it, using this funny two footed backward hop to kick leaves out of the way and pounce on whatever turns up. And towhees need the help. They're currently listed as a Tipping Point species, having lost more than half their population over the last 50 years. Every bit of backyard habitat counts for more in a situation like that, not less.

If you want to know exactly who's showing up in your yard, Merlin Bird ID (free, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) is the easiest way I know to identify a bird by sight or by its call. Open it up this spring and odds are good you'll be identifying birds that a healthy leaf layer helped feed.

How to Leave the Leaves Without Losing Your Whole Yard

You don't have to leave them all. A few piles go a long way, and here's how I handle it myself.

Rake a pile into a back corner, somewhere out of the way. Tuck some under your bushes or into the underbrush, where it doubles as mulch. Leave them whole instead of mowing them up into confetti, since shredded leaves lose the cover that caterpillars and cocoons and overwintering queens actually need.

And then, hold off on cleaning up again in spring longer than feels natural. The Xerces Society's own guidance is to wait until daytime temperatures are consistently in the 50s, your lawn needs mowing again, and the fruit trees nearby have finished blooming before you clear anything out. I know that's later than it feels like it should be. Clean up too early and you can undo most of what you protected all winter.

One more thing: keep the leaf blower away from your piles. It's loud and forceful enough to kill off exactly what you're trying to protect.

If you can stomach a few leaf piles this winter, you'll be so glad next spring when your yard lights up with fireflies and your birdhouses fill up fast.

Happy Birding,
Courtney
BHC

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