How to Make an Easy Habitat for Insects in Your Back Yard

Encourage structural diversity. Creating or supporting a varied suite of microhabitats in your yard is a sure route to attracting insects and other wildlife because habitat diversity means a greater array of resources and of ecological niches. Thus having patches of open grass interspersed with groundcover herbs, shrub thickets and trees can translate to a richer community of insects, from burrowing worms and millipedes to cicadas making a living in the high canopy.

Add a pond to your yard. A natural body of water draws in a host of aquatic and semiaquatic insects, not to mention terrestrial and aerial species coming in for a drink. Just as the pond adds to your yard’s overall habitat diversity, placing rocks and logs in the water and promoting riparian vegetation at its fringe creates more microhabitats within the wetland itself.

Allow dead trees that aren’t threatening property to stand and decay, and place logs or even boards on the ground to encourage use of your yard by insects that feed on or otherwise take shelter in and around decomposing wood. You might enjoy the side benefit of attracting cavity-nesting and bark-foraging birds like woodpeckers to your home.

Select plants that serve as hosts for specific insects during some part of their life cycle. Butterflies and moths constitute perhaps the best-known example of this intimate reliance. The larvae of monarch butterflies depend on milkweed for sustenance before metamorphosing; zebra-swallowtail caterpillars feast in the fruiting trees called pawpaws in eastern North America.

Reduce your use of yard chemicals like pesticides and herbicides. You might have to become more creative or engaged in the management of pests and weeds, but you will benefit from a more robust, healthier ecological community at your doorstep.