February 8th, 2008
“Backyard habitat is a part of the exhibit,” he says. “What zoos are doing worldwide, you can do locally.”
Ettling’s own backyard in suburban St. Louis is a model of what can be done. His frog pond, roughly the size of a two-car garage, attracted spotted salamanders, green tree 
frogs, cricket frogs, and toads in its first season. He’s planted cattails and iris around the edge to shelter the residents. Flower pots with holes cut in their sides and left in shady areas provide cool, damp refuges — “toad abodes.” Brush and rock piles at the edge of his property attract lizards, snakes and various small mammals, and a wildlife corridor of natural vegetation leads off to the nearby woods.
But you don’t have to live at the edge of the woods or even in the green expanse of suburbia to share your yard with reptiles and amphibians, he says. A rotting tree stump can provide a winter retreat for hibernating garter snakes. “One of my keepers lives across from the zoo in a built-up neighborhood. He has lined snakes and toads, right here in the middle of the city.”
“Build it and they will come,” says Andrew Snider, director of animal care and conservation at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. While the climate in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley is too dry for lush waterscapes, he says, xeriscaping serves just as well, especially as a habitat for local lizards. “And it requires a lot less water and pesticides.”
Dry as it is, still amphibians sometimes find their way into Fresno’s backyards; several times a year homeowners rescue the federally protected California tiger salamander from their swimming pools. “They’re okay if you take them out and wash them off,” Snider says.
In most areas, he says, leaf piles, compost, and grass clippings will harbor worms and soft-bodied insects and the reptiles that fed on them. Left undisturbed, they offer places for lizards, snakes and turtles to lay their eggs.
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