I shared Part 1 of this piece back in August. To recap, by “progress” I mean “how much wildlife has my habitat garden brought to my yard?” Last time I covered the most obvious category – butterflies and moths – and today I will focus on everything else. This all comes with the same caveat as before: I have no baseline wildlife survey to compare this to. I’m really just making a self-congratulatory list of wildlife sightings in my yard. Somehow, I am OK with that!

Before I move on, I do want to briefly mention four additional lepidopterans since August: the eastern comma (Polygonia comma), tobacco hornworm, aka Carolina sphinx moth (Manduca sexta), raspberry pyrausta moth (Pyrausta signatalis), and giant leopard moth (Hypercompe scribonia).

Insects, Non-Lepidopteran

Insects are an overwhelmingly diverse Class of animal life. I will never be able to identify to species every insect I find in my yard. There are plenty I can, though (especially with help). I’m able to put many more into the appropriate Family or Genus. Based on that, I am able to confidently list 90 insect species for my yard, including the butterflies and moths from the last post. That number doesn’t precisely represent individual insects confidently identified to species, although there is only a little fluff. “Fluff” in this case just means an insect I am very confident is a different species from any of the others included. For example, my garden was visited by a juvenile praying mantis for about a week last year. I can’t tell the difference between a Carolina and a Chinese mantis at that stage, but I can certainly say it wasn’t an ant or a caterpillar. Bees and wasps I can treat similarly: I can spot the difference between a yellowjacket and a bumblebee but am not well-versed in recognizing the individual species of each.

Spiders

Spiders are tough. When I get a photo to review, I am often confronted with notes like “identification to species requires dissection,” or find that I need to be able to see a very specific detail very clearly. Consequently, despite encountering certainly thousands of spiders I only have 16 species on my life list. Of those, only six have I found in my yard. They are: marbled orbweaver, basilica orbweaver, orchard orbweaver, woodlouse hunter, broad-faced sac spider, and Pholcus manueli. I can add at least four “fluff” species (a green crab spider, a jumping spider, a grass spider, and a brownish orbweaver) for a total of ten.

Other Invertebrates

Isn’t that specific? As much as I hate to lump all this together it’s so much more convenient than typing up categories for each individual kind of invertebrate. I am not enough of an expert to ID many of the included creatures precisely anyway. So what do I have here? The wood tick and house centipede are present for sure. I’ve found earthworms, pill bugs, harvestmen, centipedes, and millipedes of an unknown number of species each. At least three species of slug round out the list. That’s another ten animals in total, under the most conservative of estimates.

Birds

Thanks to eBird, I have very good data on the bird species I have spotted in my yard. It comes to forty-three species, and while none of these is particularly uncommon and five or so are merely flyovers, that feels like a pretty good number. And yet… just a few blocks away in Wheaton Regional Park birders have collectively tallied over 170 species. I’ve found more than sixty there myself. I won’t likely be attracting any, say, spotted sandpipers to my yard… but there is some room for improvement.

Mammals

This is a short and boring list (but try telling my dogs that!) Eastern gray squirrel, eastern fox squirrel, southern flying squirrel, eastern chipmunk, eastern cottontail, Norway rat, white-footed mouse, white-tailed deer, human, dog. Add some unidentified species of mice and bats, and it’s an even dozen. I do think the dogs somewhat cut down on the mammal population I might otherwise see here… I have after all come across groundhogs and foxes in the neighborhood and I know raccoons, possums, and skunks are about. As irritating as the rat population is, at least they’ve never made it inside.

Amphibians

An even shorter, but hopefully less boring, list:

Northern green frog

gray (or possibly Cope’s gray) treefrog

American toad (no one needs a picture of one of these, right?

And that’s the list! So to recap, that’s a grand total of: 90 insects, 10 spiders, 10 other invertebrates, 43 birds, 12 mammals, and 3 amphibians – 168 total animal species cataloged in my yard. All my instincts say that 168 is a big number, yet as I mentioned above more species of birds alone have been recorded in our neighborhood park.