If you want to attract more wildlife to your backyard, one of your primary tasks should be to replace the non-native plants growing there with native varieties. Why? It all comes down to the first wildlife needs: food.
Native plants also matter for another crucial and disappearing wildlife category: pollinators. These are creatures like butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds that eat nectar from flowers. When they feed on nectar, pollinators transfer pollen from flower to flower, allowing plants to reproduce.
We depend on pollinators for more than the mere enjoyment of seeing wildlife. An astonishing 87 percent of flowering plant species rely on pollinators to help them reproduce. Lose the pollinators, and you lose those plants. And pollinators are in trouble. There’s a real danger that in the not too distant future, we could lose many of these amazing creatures. The population of our most important pollinators, bees, have declined sharply in recent decades.
