Chic Wildlife Houses to Welcome Beneficial Critters & Control Garden Pests This Spring – Natural Pest Control Never Looked So Good!

Bringing beneficial wildlife into your backyard will help control mosquitoes, ants, slugs and snails as well as pollinate veggies and fruit trees for abundant crops. And, while a food supply will attract these helpful critters, providing habitat will keep them in your garden and support their lifecycles, ensuring sustainable, natural pest control for years to come.

Birds like swallows, martins and bluebirds are aerial insectivores, meaning they’re highly skilled at catching food on the wing – and mozzies are on their menu. Bats, too, eat an enormous amount of mosquitoes. And even a tiny house wren will eat up to a thousand bugs and spiders per day.

Toads have a huge appetite for garden pests, too, and estimates suggest a single toad eats over a hundred slugs, snails and insects every night. And while toads needs to visit a pond to breed, this amphibian can live up to three miles from a water source so provide a damp, shady abode and one might move in and keep on top of your garden slug and snail population.

Ladybugs are incredibly efficient at controlling aphids, another common garden pest. An adult ladybug eats around 50 aphids in a day, and their larvae devour twice that amount. Add bees and butterflies, both to pollinate vegetable plants and form part of the food chain to feed birds, and you create a backyard ecosystem that will naturally take care of your garden pest control. This is a boon, especially if you garden organically so don't want to use chemical solutions.

So, no matter how big or small your backyard, making room for a wildlife house is a wise move. Spring is a great time to add habitat to your garden as lots of creatures are actively looking for shelter. Here’s my pick of habitats that are as stylish as they are snug, so they work as outdoor decor as well as supporting the critters that’ll keep on top of garden pests.

Stylish Toad Abodes

Site your toad house in a quiet, shady and damp spot in your garden, ideally facing north away from direct sun.

Bonny Birdhouses

Location is key to birds occupying a nestbox. Site the box 5–12 feet high, preferably on a north- or east-facing wall to avoid direct sun and wet winds. It’s vital that birds have a clear flight path to and from the box.

Snug Ladybug Nooks

Ladybugs will shelter, breed and hibernate in any safe, dry nook or cranny in your garden. It’s easy to make your own ladybug habitat by stuffing any natural material that creates a multitude of small spaces, such as pinecones, dry leaves and hollow stems, inside a waterproof container such as a plant pot, laid on its side in a sheltered spot. Or plant some natural shelter that brings garden good looks as well as favored cover for these natural pest predators.

Border Pollinator Palaces

Push a staked mixed bug hotel into a border full of nectar-rich blooms for pollinators to add accommodation to the buffet already on offer. All these bug hotels will support ladybugs and lacewings as well as solitary bees and butterflies.

Brilliant Butterfly Shelters

Butterflies don’t eat any garden pests but they do produce caterpillars which will attract birds who do. A surprising number of butterflies hibernate, and providing habitat will also offer them shelter from bad weather and predators.

Handsome Bat Boxes

A bat can eat the equivalent of half its bodyweight in insects in a night, so it makes good sense to give them a place to roost if your garden is plagued with mozzies.

Solitary Bee Barns

While bees don’t control pests, they contribute greatly to a garden food chain, for an effective pest-prevention ecosystem. Solitary bees are docile and don’t swarm – males don’t even have a sting, and females only sting if handled roughly – so are considered safe in gardens. Different species like to use holes of different sizes to lay their eggs, so always look for a bee hotel with variously sized tubes. Site your bee hotel in a sunny, sheltered, south- or south-east facing spot, 3–6 feet above the ground, for plenty of guests.