Habitat Piles

With its ecology feeling the pressures of climate change and human use, the Island could use a hand providing habitat for small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles—as well as the larger animals that rely on them for prey.  Landowners can pitch in by preserving or creating habitat piles on their property.

A habitat pile is exactly what it sounds like: a pile of brush, wood, stone, or other natural debris that provides a place for animals to live or hunt.  They’re great hideouts for newts, lizards, and native snakes.  These piles also give predators, like owls and hawks, a place to hunt for rodents and other small mammals, frequent denizens of these structures.

Habitat piles come into being naturally when storms produce clumped debris or flooding washes wood or rocks into settlement areas.  Well-meaning landowners sometimes destroy these structures because they think the piles are unnatural.  Their motivation seems to stem from the belief that disturbances like storms or floods hurt the ecological health of a landscape.  The exact opposite is true, of course:  Disturbance is a required part of an ecosystem’s regime.  Simply put, if habitat piles appear on your property thanks to natural disturbance, they’ve appeared for some purpose.  You know, habitat.  Maybe we should just leave them be?

If habitat piles don’t occur naturally on your property, consider building some “prosthetic” ones, the term applied to human-made structures of this kind. Two common types are those made of wood or stone. (The two materials can be combined in a pile, too.)

To build the wooden type, begin with the largest-diameter logs you have for the job.  The length of these logs will determine the width of the pile, which needn’t be large. It’s ideal, but not essential, to center the pile on a stump or boulder.  Place one end of the logs atop this central high point so that each radiates out from that point.  You now have a rough circle of logs with a raised center.  Repeat this pattern with successive layers of woody material of smaller and smaller thicknesses but equivalent length, ending with a layer of light branches.  The finished pile resembles a teepee with lots of holes and spaces animals can visit or inhabit.

The same technique is used in creating stone habitat piles, minus the raised middle.  As with wooden structures, the pile can be as large or small as you like.  One option is to begin by laying a piece of drainage pipe on the ground, running from what will be the pile’s outside to its center, to serve animals as a “transit tunnel” into the structure.  Build a circle of your biggest rocks around that pipe.  Then, place a layer of the next-biggest rocks atop this base, creating a slightly smaller-radius course.  Repeat with increasingly smaller stones in smaller circles until you reach a pinnacle point.