Wildlife stay near human homes for predator protection

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Sometimes we humans run a protection scheme for wildlife.

Remember the protection rackets depicted in shows such as "The Untouchables"? They work like this: The mob's goons make sure nothing bad happens to a business and in return the business makes a monthly payment to the mob.

The best known wildlife protection scheme is for purple martins. We hang nesting gourds or erect martin hotels around our homes and in return the martins eat a lot of flying insects, many of them biting pests.

People have been doing it for so long that most purple martins won't nest anywhere else.

The nest boxes are nice, but the human mob also protects the martins. Many people examine martin houses regularly during nesting season and if they find another cavity nester, such as the starling, they throw it out.

Just living near people has its advantages too. Other wildlife that would eat the martin eggs or fledglings - snakes, for example - try to avoid people for their own safety.

Many gardeners make the same kind of deal with house wrens. They provide a nest box and the wren eats garden bugs and even discourages other birds that would eat from the garden.

Protection is most often provided unintentionally, however. Some wildlife just chooses to live near you because it knows that you won't mind and its predators will.

Eastern cottontail rabbits nest in a hole just 2 feet off my front porch, for example. Bunnies are food for a lot of predators such as hawks, foxes and owls. But such wary predators would have to be starving before they'd come within 2 feet of my porch.

Every spring I get calls or
e-mails from people excited or distressed because birds are nesting on their porch. This week's call from Dorrie Papa-
demetriou, of Linwood, was typical.

A small bird with red on it had made a nest in one of her hanging plants. What should she do?

Dorrie, like virtually all callers, was worried that human activity on the porch - particularly watering the plant - would disturb the nest, causing the eggs or fledgling to be abandoned.

I've known people who let their plant die from lack of watering just so they wouldn't disturb the nest.

But house finches (Dorrie's bird) and house sparrows choose to nest as close to us as possible for the protection we provide. You can be sure that no crow is going to come down and eat the fledglings from a nest in a hanging basket on someone's porch.

To these birds, the porch, its plants, the watering and the people coming and going are just preferred natural conditions - a niche perfect for them. They chose it based on those conditions and expect them to continue.

Dorrie and her family can peek at the eggs with no problem. They will soon get to hear fledglings begging for food and see parents spend all day providing it.

House finches in particular so frequently nest in planters, mailboxes and other porch nooks that I wonder if someday they won't be largely dependent on us just as purple martins are now.

Only these seed eaters don't provide a service such as eating insect pests. Now that there's less wildlife in the world, we just like having some around.