The same wildlife we help you remove from your home can be your best pest controllers when you give them a place to live outdoors. Here's how to turn your Northeast Wisconsin yard into a working habitat — bats, dragonflies, kestrels, lacewings, and more, all doing free pest control.
A water source is the single biggest draw — a small pond or birdbath brings in dragonflies, frogs, and the birds that eat pest insects.
Native plants feed native insects. Even a small wildflower strip supports the bees, hoverflies, and predators that keep pests in check.
Brush piles, rock walls, a bug hotel, and a bat or kestrel box give beneficial wildlife places to live so they stay and work.
Stop broadcast spraying. Targeted IPM treatments protect the beneficials you just invited in and let them do the pest control for you.
Mount a bat house 12–20 feet up on a pole or building, in full sun and near water. A successful house can host a colony that eats thousands of mosquitoes nightly — and keeps bats out of your attic.
American kestrels are declining, and a well-placed nest box on an open field edge can host a family that eats hundreds of mice, voles, and grasshoppers a season. Install by late winter ahead of breeding season.
A 3-foot strip of native wildflowers — milkweed, coneflower, black-eyed Susan, bergamot — feeds bumble bees, solitary bees, and hoverflies that pollinate your garden and eat your aphids. Bloom from spring to frost.
A bundle of hollow stems, drilled hardwood blocks, and pinecones in a sheltered spot gives lacewings, mason bees, and other beneficial insects a place to overwinter — so they emerge to hunt your aphids next spring.
Even a small backyard pond — no fish, shallow edges, a few native plants — draws dragonflies and frogs that eat hundreds of mosquitoes and flies a day. Skip the mosquito dunks if you want the predators to show up.
A corner of the yard left "messy" — a brush pile, a leaf layer under shrubs, an old log — gives snakes, toads, and spiders the cover they need. The result is free, quiet pest control all season long.
Broad-spectrum sprays kill lacewings, mantids, and hoverflies along with the pests. Switch to targeted, IPM-based treatments and let the beneficial insects you just invited in do most of the work for free.
A great backyard habitat keeps beneficial wildlife outdoors — but when bats, skunks, or carpenter ants cross the line into your living space, Mid State handles it humanely and keeps your habitat intact.