Fallen leaves can benefit wildlife
By JOYLYN BUKOVAC
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee (WSMV) — If your weekend to do list includes raking the leaves in your yard then throwing them away, you might want to reconsider. Wildlife experts say having leaves in your lawn is good.
“They are great for insects and other types of wildlife, so turtles and amphibians. That’s really the only way that they are going to survive winter here,” Debbie Sykes, director of the Nashville Wildlife Conservation said. “The leaves provide a nice thick blanket and keeps the ground a little bit warmer and dryer, so it protects them as they hibernate, or bromate, through winter.”
Sykes says there are still things you can do to take care of your yard this fall.
“Whether it’s leaving all of the leaves or maybe mulching them or running them over with your lawn mower so that they are not going to kill your lawn and instead they’ll still provide the benefit and they’ll also make the soil a lot more healthy so it’s actually,” Sykes explained. “If that’s still unsightly then you can just leave a couple of big piles of leaves and that’s going to protect the wildlife but it’s also going to give you more of a compromise, so you don’t have an ugly yard.”
If you don’t want to keep your leaves around, you can donate your leaves to the Nashville Wildlife Conservation if you don’t use pesticides on your grass.
“They help keep our turtles in our turtle hospital and other mammals that we are rehabilitating– it helps decrease their stress so they can hide underneath the leaves,” Sykes says they also use leaves to hide food for other wildlife they take care of including their possum. “It actually makes her work hard like she would have to do in the wild. If we give them just a bowl of food in captivity that can increase their stress because they eat all the food, and they spend the rest of the night looking around for food that isn’t there.”
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