Creating certified wildlife habitat in your own backyard

SULPHUR, La. (KPLC) - How would you like to have a certified wildlife habitat in your own back yard. Well, you can and a local woman has done so and you can too.

“For me, we’re all God’s creatures and we all need to pay attention to providing habitat for all God’s creatures,” said Cindy Robertson of Sulphur.

She has established a wildlife habitat certified by the National Wildlife Federation and it’s in the backyard at Micah 6:8. The habitat is comprised of a pond, and goldfish who call it home, a garden, compost and, of course, other living creates such as rescue goats Dolly and Jewel.

She says it’s really not that difficult.

“You have to go through this little checklist and make sure that you have certain components as we do, water, food, shelter for different native species,” said Robertson.

She hope to eventually have a plaque and be able to use it for educational purposes.

“We definitely have snakes, we’ve got Rattatouille, our rat snake. We have saltwater snake families, so we call them, I call them Salty 1, 2, 3 and 4 because, I’m so creative with names, bees and we have patches of grass that are not mowed with clover in them for the bees to eat. And of course they love the flowers in the front yard,” she said.

There’s a community garden and compost. She says those who weed get to help harvest and eat and as it develops she plans to make it bigger and better for all the neighborhood to enjoy.

“And when the orchard gets going I’ve got a cherry tree and a nectarine tree and a paw paw tree a goji berry bush, two mulberry bushes and two blackberry bushes and a fig tree,” she said.

Perhaps most of all, she hopes to use the habitat for educational purposes. Cindy says she knows kids who didn’t understand the relationship between the outdoors and the food they see in the grocery stores which she feels is important. And Robertson hopes it will keep thriving when one day she will leave it to the community.

For more on establishing a Wildlife Habitat in your yard, click here.