Where the Wild Things Are
Written By Hope Goodrich
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How one Florida family shook up their yawn of a lawn and created a certified wildlife habitat.
Not long ago, in a small suburban backyard in Florida, three little boys were stunned into silence. Their eyes fixed on the same point. The quiet was interminable: perhaps 0.8 seconds. Then Davis yelped, "We're rich!" "We've struck gold!" hollered Lucas. "That's gotta be worth a thousand bucks!" roared Bernardo.
The object that held them rapt was a luminous green monarch butterfly chrysalis (or pupa) studded with gold filigree. Davis is used to finding such treasure in his backyard because it serves as an oasis for small mammals, birds, lizards, frogs, fish, and, yes, butterflies. The place is so inviting that the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) designated it a "backyard wildlife habitat," one of 60,000 across the country.
Davis's mom, Heidi (Davis is her youngest; Bernardo and Lucas, twin brothers, are his pals), grew up on a 500-acre farm in Maine. "It was woods beyond woods," she says. "I wanted to give my children some of what I had, to teach them to be still in nature, to pay attention." So, she dug up the border of her lawn and laid in splashes of red and orange flowers to rope in birds and butterflies. She built a pond. She planted fruit trees. "It only takes a teensy space of plants for animals to make communities. The trick is to provide their four basic needs: food, water, cover, and places to raise their young."
