2 ms·

I just want to chip in to confirm that with only minor actions and pretty much no sacrifice on your end, you really can help A LOT of small wildlife. Not only d

by fleddr 5y ago

I just want to chip in to confirm that with only minor actions and pretty much no sacrifice on your end, you really can help A LOT of small wildlife. Not only do you help it, it quite simply makes your environment nicer too. Should you have a garden, even if small, don't go for exotic plants, select local ones. You can easily optimize the ones attractive to bees and butterflies. Combine with one of those insect hotels (be sure to get a deep one) and presto...you just created a brand new ecosystem that is fun to watch. Minimize lawn surface to what has actual real utility, use the rest for plants, bushes, trees, a simple pond. You're going to be amazed at all the stuff that appears the next season. Have some tall bushes with dense foliage and the first bird nest will soon appear. Clean dead leafs from your path for your safety, but nowhere else. Its nutrition for a very complex and rich ecosystem of soil animals. Don't kill everything that moves with pesticides, only take care of plague insects forming a real and direct threat. A bat box is the cheapest thing, and your reward is sustaining these stunning animals, as they clear out excess mosquitos. Their appearance can be timed nearly to the minute every single day, just before sunset. Shut down needless lights, allow nocturnal wildlife to do their thing and stop confusing moths. The above costs near-zero effort at near-zero cost. The effect is that you're sustaining a complex web of life, from mesofauna to larger insects, snails, amphibians, flowers, birds, bats. Just casually observing all this buzz from the garden chair is wonderful. Quite a lot better than the sterile "tiles and lawn". Even better is to get a macro lens and capture it all, you'll be set for life with an amazing hobby. Do it. Give wildlife a little room, and give it a chance. It will blow your mind how it will thrive. If still not convinced, might I add that the above is 100% compatible with the lazy. Once it's in place, it's pretty much inaction from there.

prawn 5y ago
I'm not convinced an insect hotel does anything useful. Ours and any others I've seen get taken over by spiders and webs just about instantly. And the spiders here already have enough places to live!
- fleddr 5y ago
  This just shows you still have the wrong mindset in wanting to manage outcomes. The goal of an insect hotel is not to maximize insects you like to see or think are pretty. The goal is to create a habitat normally found in nature itself. A place to nest or even overwinter. Because our concrete jungle has few of such places. After creating the place, you let it play out. In your case, spiders seem to dominate it. So what? Spiders are a valuable part of the ecosystem. If they become too numerous, birds will thin the herd as will parasitic wasps. In my garden, I do get a fair amount of various bee species in the hotel. 80% of them won't have a successful life cycle due to other predatory insects. Not only is that normal, it's supposed to happen. Insects have a ridiculously numerous offspring. I also see the opposite happening. Thin-waisted predatory wasps hunting baby spiders, stuffing them in their hotel room for their larvae. Anyway, if you still believe the spiders are out of control in your place, it means your garden has too few songbirds. In an urban environment, highly common songbirds and spider wasps are the top predators of spiders.
  - prawn 5y ago
    Not sure where you live but I'm in Australia. In Europe or North America, I hear virtually no birds. In Australia and including in my suburban backyard, there are loads of birds - songbirds, parrots/lorikeets/cockatoos, magpies. I have an acacia (with parasitic growths that birds visit for berries) and loads of fruit trees among other things that attract birds. We have no shortage of birds. But this is Australia and there are many spiders - trees, ground, adapted to the urban environment, etc. Huntsmen, red backs, black house spiders, white-tailed, orb weavers, wolf spiders, mouse spiders, etc. Every alcove or cavity or pipe has a spider. Go out with a headlamp at night, and the eyes of wolf spiders reflect back at you from everywhere. Spiders live in all the rear-view mirrors of my cars, and under the rear wiper blades. Multiple spiders live in the frame of each window and sliding door, at all times. From my travels, I'm convinced we have a far more noticeable urban spider population than say Europe or the US. The urban environment here is flooded with spiders. Corrugated iron is perfect for them, creating a cavity every inch or two the length of a building. Multiple spiders live on every chair of my outdoor setting. Not much of the back verandah does not have continually refreshed spider detritus hanging underneath eaves. If I turn a spadeful in the garden when it's dry, multiple wolf spiders emerge and try to resettle. Admittedly our gifted spider hotel is small (size of a box of cereal), but it only takes one spider to crawl a scrappy web across it, and it's not going to be of much use to insects. In my 40+ years, I've found one wasp nest with entombed spiders (mostly large orb weavers). But you can't move around here without encountering a spider. Maybe an insect hotel stands a better chance elsewhere in the world, but here it is trivial for every cavity to be controlled even by one spider, and I'm pretty confident spiders are not in desperate need of more housing opportunities.

by fleddr 5y ago

prawn 5y ago

I'm not convinced an insect hotel does anything useful. Ours and any others I've seen get taken over by spiders and webs just about instantly. And the spiders here already have enough places to live!

fleddr 5y ago
This just shows you still have the wrong mindset in wanting to manage outcomes. The goal of an insect hotel is not to maximize insects you like to see or think are pretty. The goal is to create a habitat normally found in nature itself. A place to nest or even overwinter. Because our concrete jungle has few of such places. After creating the place, you let it play out. In your case, spiders seem to dominate it. So what? Spiders are a valuable part of the ecosystem. If they become too numerous, birds will thin the herd as will parasitic wasps. In my garden, I do get a fair amount of various bee species in the hotel. 80% of them won't have a successful life cycle due to other predatory insects. Not only is that normal, it's supposed to happen. Insects have a ridiculously numerous offspring. I also see the opposite happening. Thin-waisted predatory wasps hunting baby spiders, stuffing them in their hotel room for their larvae. Anyway, if you still believe the spiders are out of control in your place, it means your garden has too few songbirds. In an urban environment, highly common songbirds and spider wasps are the top predators of spiders.
- prawn 5y ago
  Not sure where you live but I'm in Australia. In Europe or North America, I hear virtually no birds. In Australia and including in my suburban backyard, there are loads of birds - songbirds, parrots/lorikeets/cockatoos, magpies. I have an acacia (with parasitic growths that birds visit for berries) and loads of fruit trees among other things that attract birds. We have no shortage of birds. But this is Australia and there are many spiders - trees, ground, adapted to the urban environment, etc. Huntsmen, red backs, black house spiders, white-tailed, orb weavers, wolf spiders, mouse spiders, etc. Every alcove or cavity or pipe has a spider. Go out with a headlamp at night, and the eyes of wolf spiders reflect back at you from everywhere. Spiders live in all the rear-view mirrors of my cars, and under the rear wiper blades. Multiple spiders live in the frame of each window and sliding door, at all times. From my travels, I'm convinced we have a far more noticeable urban spider population than say Europe or the US. The urban environment here is flooded with spiders. Corrugated iron is perfect for them, creating a cavity every inch or two the length of a building. Multiple spiders live on every chair of my outdoor setting. Not much of the back verandah does not have continually refreshed spider detritus hanging underneath eaves. If I turn a spadeful in the garden when it's dry, multiple wolf spiders emerge and try to resettle. Admittedly our gifted spider hotel is small (size of a box of cereal), but it only takes one spider to crawl a scrappy web across it, and it's not going to be of much use to insects. In my 40+ years, I've found one wasp nest with entombed spiders (mostly large orb weavers). But you can't move around here without encountering a spider. Maybe an insect hotel stands a better chance elsewhere in the world, but here it is trivial for every cavity to be controlled even by one spider, and I'm pretty confident spiders are not in desperate need of more housing opportunities.