Food
Water
Shelter/Cover
Places to Raise Young
In this website I hope to share some experiences we have had in building our habitat.
My original plan was to plant the yard thickly with California native plants that would provide food and shelter for the birds and animals. But that was before I learned that gardening at high altitude was not the same as the gardening I had done before.
We are located at 6,200 feet elevation in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California. Our climate is fairly harsh for good gardening as we have learned the hard way. We learned that high altitude gardeing involves more than just dealing with low temperatures. We have problems with very low humidity, low preciptation (mostly in the form of snow), high winds, and soil that isn't really soil yet (basically it is decomposed granite). The ground doesn't hold moisture since there is very little organic matter. We also have very intense ultra-violet light. When the garden books say "full sun" it doesn't really mean full sun at this elevation.
We've had plants destroyed, eaten, and dug up by gophers, raccoons, gray squirrels and ground squirrels. One year we were invaded with a colony of ground squirrels that ate nearly every new plant (you won't see garden pictures from 2001 - it was a bad year in the garden).
But our habitat is starting to thrive. We've had nesting Western Bluebirds, Mountain Chickadees, and Steller's Jays. We've had several nesting squirrel families. Merriam's Chipmunks are coming into the yard to gather seed. And just recently we found a large lizard basking in the sun on a large rock.
