WE TALK ABOUT pollinator gardens, and seek out the plants that provide that essential nourishment to bees and butterflies and moths, for example. But insects do not live by pollen alone. To make our gardens places of life-sustaining habitat, we have to provide for other needs, too—like water, for instance, and shelter in each season of the year and more.

A new book called “Natural Habitats & Wildlife Gardening: Inviting Nature Into Your Backyard” (affiliate link), by Shaun McCoshum, provides inspiration for doing just that.

Shaun is a landscape ecologist, conservationist, pollinator researcher, and writer who has worked on green energy initiatives, conservation projects, and habitat plans across the United States.

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “Natural Habitats & Wildlife Gardening: Inviting Nature Into Your Backyard.”

Read along as you listen to the March 30, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

creating habitat, with shaun mccoshum

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:26:23 | Recorded on March 27, 2026

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Margaret Roach: How are you, Shaun? And where are you; where are we talking from?

Shaun McCoshum: So I moved to Corpus Christi, Tex., about two years ago. Yeah.

Margaret: That’s your natural habitat right now. O.K, good. [Laughter.]

I remember a talk you did, maybe it was last year, that I believe is now posted on your YouTube channel [below]. It was called “Going Beyond Plant Lists,” which is kind of perfect. And we do have to go beyond plant lists to make a garden that’s a complex living organism or system, don’t we? Not just a flower bed, right?

Shaun: Oh, absolutely. Yes.

Margaret: So that’s kind of the premise. When I took away from the book, and there’s a lot of science in the book and there’s a lot of other habitats that I don’t know about, deserts and whatever. And there’s things for all areas of the country and so forth. But that’s what was one of the overarching things that I took was that I have to do more than feed them [laughter].

Shaun: Yes. Moving beyond plant lists is a really good talk because for that specific audience—it was for mostly gardeners—and we were really able to talk about how rockscaping, borders, logs, birdhouses, all these things play into creating habitat inside of our gardens. And typically when we think about creating a pollinator garden, where we see these articles that say, “plant this, plant that,” but it doesn’t say also provide shelter.

Monarchs is a good example: plant milkweed for monarchs, because it’s a host plant and they’ll nectar on the flowers. It is a fantastic plant. But those monarchs need to get off the plant to shed their skin between each caterpillar stage, and then they need a safe place to pupate. So they typically won’t do that on the plant because as it’s getting eaten, it’s going to expose them to the sunlight. So they want to be in a place where they’re going to be less likely to be found by predators, but also not exposed to the sun.

So by providing a diversity of plants or hiding places and shelter, we create a better habitat and increase the survival likelihood of all of the animals we’re trying to support.

Margaret: Right. Well, and so for instance, we all are thinking about, oh, bees, I want to attract the bees and they’re pollinating and blah, blah, blah. And so a lot of times we’re shopping the catalogs, or at the nursery, for perennials with flowers and so forth. And we know about we want to have an extended period of bloom, not just one minute in the garden season and so forth, and that’s all good. But…then what else do the bees need, for example, and we don’t really think about that. And there’s so many different species of bees, so that is another thing altogether. But can we use them as an example, too?

Shaun: Oh, 100 percent. So the native bees, if we’re looking at North America, we’ve about 4,000 species of native bees. About 70 percent of those are ground nesters. And surprisingly, scientists don’t have a lot of data for which areas in the ground bees like to nest. Out of the entire 20,000 species in the world, we’ve only described about 500 species’ nesting habitats, and most of those are not in-ground.

So of the ones that are in the ground, we have found that they prefer sandy to clay soils. A number of our larger bees, like our digger bees, they like compacted clay. You’ll find them in old bison trails, cattle trails, two-track roads, or even running paths in some of our parks. Perditas to be like sandy areas right next to the sidewalk where they can excavate and carry out those grains of sand that fit inside of their mandibles.

And inside of our gardens, we’re typically providing really good soils for plants to grow in, but that’s not necessarily good nesting habitat for the native bees we’re trying to support. So then they’re relegated to weird places around our landscape, sometimes next to the driveway or next to the sidewalk, or in a fence line. But if we intentionally understand that these sandy soils need to be provided or these clay soils need to be provided, we can do it in areas like along our paths or around our HVAC units, but we can incorporate it into the design in a way that’s attractive, but also very useful to the animals instead of leaving them the chance to find the resources that they need.

Margaret: And a lot of people think, “Oh, but I bought a bee hotel.” [Laughter.]

Shaun: Yeah.

Margaret: That’s a great example. And I’m not a bee hotel person. You know what I mean? I’m not as much of a gimmicky person as I am someone who likes to try to figure out something else. Obviously the bee hotel works at least at first, but there’s drawbacks, yes?

Shaun: Yes, absolutely. So with the bee hotels, we have to ask ourselves, what is it mimicking in nature? I mean, when was the last time you saw a bunch of bamboo tied up in a bunch naturally existing, right?

Margaret: Oh, it doesn’t? I didn’t know that. [Laughter.]

Shaun: So if we look at where a lot of these cavity-nesting bees, which are using those bee hotels, they’re actually cavity-nesting bees, not specifically stem-nesting bees. And they typically would be utilizing old beetle burrows outside of dead wood. So things like Cerambycidae, which is a longhorn beetle or Buprestidae, which are the metallic wood-boring beetles—when those larvae leave wood, they leave these clean tunnels that naturally would be utilized by many of the species that are going to utilize the bee hotels.

Margaret: Oh.

Shaun: But when we’re talking about stem-nesting bees—and there’s a lot of confusion between the bee hotels and stem-nesting bees, because we’re using bamboo stems—a lot of stem-nesting bees are actually excavating pith outside of the stems that they’re using. And although a cavity-nesting bee will utilize a hollow stem, inside of a healthy natural ecosystem, those little tiny hollow stems typically aren’t the things that they would select for unless you’re talking about Ceratinas or a couple wasps. The majority of them are going to be utilizing the wood or crevices in between rocks and building their shelves inside of those spaces, which are just being mimicked and centralized inside of a bee hotel.

Margaret: And can they also, the bee hotels, can they sometimes … They’re not clean eventually, are they? Do you know what I mean? Do they-

Shaun: Correct. A few researchers have done longterm studies with bee hotels. And in fact, in the 1960s and ’70s, we were trying to create these walls of hotels around alfalfa fields because those bees need those cavities. And the first year they get colonized and they’re great, and they get filled with bees. Second year typically has a pretty strong population. But by the third year, the pollen mites become a problem and they spread and start eating all of the pollen and then the larvae starve. The parasitoids, the bees that take over those cells or eat the larvae and then eat the pollen, those populations grow. And we’ve pretty much created this buffet for everything that eats bees, because bees aren’t really high up on the food chain. They’re pretty low.

So yes, you are right. The bee hotels do become a problem after a few years and we are supposed to clean them and replace them if we are utilizing them in our gardens.

And being in a small neighborhood, it’s hard to have the natural succession of wood forming, beetles coming out of it and creating all those new hotels. So the bee hotels do have a place in our gardens, but they should be small and they do need to be replaced every few years, and moved around. I recommend in the book, move them from corner to corner in your yard from year to year so that any of those pollen mites or parasitoids at least have to do a little bit more work to find a new home for them. And they’re part of the ecosystem, too.

Margaret: You said the word succession, and in a bigger sense, early in the book, you remind us that natural habitats, wild spaces, whatever, they often comprise various stages of succession. It’s not all freshly planted stuff like a brand new flowerbed that I just planted with stuff from the nursery, or it’s not all just pollinator plants. There’s decay, and there’s a half-dead something or other [laughter], and there’s things in various stages and ages and so forth. And I think our gardens often lack that as well, don’t they, the idea of succession?

Shaun: Yes, I fully agree with that. And in the book, I worked with some amazing photographers and there’s some really solid photos of post-burn meadows where the trees are still standing and that would be the habitat that the bees would be nesting in, or the resources the bees would be nesting in. And moths would be pupating and beetles would be developing. But then you have these beautiful Phlox and larkspurs and lupines growing in between these dead trees, which is what we typically plant inside of our yards. So I like to show that juxtaposition of those two kind of ideas that the plants that we’re putting in our yard, in their natural habitat, have these other resources that so many of the wildlife we’re trying to support depend on.

Margaret: I mean, and again, I said the word decay, and that’s in the book, and it sounds like a negative word, right? Decay. “Ooh, that sounds bad. Ooh, I don’t want any decay.” It sounds like something for you to go to the dentist about [laughter]. But that’s not what it is. It’s part of the life cycle and it’s such a critically important aspect of it.

Because for example, even as hardworking as woodpeckers are who are happy to—and I use that word “happy” and anthropomorphize, I’m sorry—but anyway, they’re out there and they’re going to make a cavity and someone else may decide to use it at some point, maybe lucky enough to use it, and it’s fantastic all the sort of pass-along habitats that they provide for other creatures. However, if we don’t have trees that are in a condition that the woodpecker listens and scopes out and says, “This is a good one,” and then goes ahead and starts excavating, you know what I mean? It’s like if we take down and clean up and erase every declining dead and dying tree, well, there’s not as many opportunities for even the woodpeckers to do their good job, I think.

Shaun: Right. And we see that decline in or that affecting the populations of animals and seeing a decline in cavity-nesting birds and fungus that live in these woods that … Like chicken of the woods is big in the Northeast. People like to go and forage for it; you can cook it. It’s bright orange; it’s gorgeous. And it depends on dead wood that has sat for a while and has started to decay and that mycelium’s able to grow through it.

And that whole log that we call dead is so alive with insects and fungus and bacteria and all these different things that are utilizing it that I wish we could change that vernacular from “dead wood” to “living ecosystem of previous trees” or something. We clearly don’t have the English term for it.

But in the book, I try and bring that into our landscaping designs, too, that we can bring in log borders, we can bring in bird boxes that mimic these hollow stems, we can bring in bat boxes. And we see this regularly when we go to the store, that we’re trying to mimic some of these resources. But there’s so many animals and plants that depend on the nutrient cycles of that wood breaking down, that it really is important to bring in some of those larger pieces of downed wood and lay them in our yards and use them as part of the landscape to create a whole habitat for the organisms that we’re trying to support.

Margaret: And if we have a declining or a dead or a fallen tree, then welcome it. You know what I mean? Incorporate it, welcome it. Don’t cast it out. Don’t hire someone and pay money to, again, erase it.

I think of them as—you said we need a good word—I think of it as biomass, because it makes me remember that it’s alive in a way. Do you know what I mean? I say biomass. But all you have to do is have watched … I had a big old birch tree out in the backyard that was here long before I ever was, and it started to decline and I turned it into a snag and then it declined and lasted about 10 years in that condition or maybe seven years in that condition. And then finally it was getting wonky and I took more of it down to stabilize it, but I lay this big piece next to the root system.

And then a pileated woodpecker, he was happy to be using the part that was on the ground. He didn’t mind that it wasn’t standing up anymore. He was happy for months [laughter]. Do you know what I mean? And then there’s all these unseen organisms, probably billions of them that were happy, too. And again, I’m anthropomorphizing galore; that’s my thing. Everybody’s happy.

Shaun: It’s good to. It helps us connect with the nature to empathize and put some of the emotions with these animals and plants even.

Margaret: Well, and woodpeckers always look happy to me for some reason. They’re so charismatic [laughter].

Shaun: They really are. I love seeing them.

Margaret: So much energy. But yeah, so introducing some of these things, and again, not thinking, “Oh, decay, oh, dead,” but thinking, “Oh, wow, this is life sustaining. This is part of the cycle.”

Shaun: Yeah.

Margaret: Yeah. And I think that you point out in the book that the practice of leave the leaves that’s become so popular in recent years, that’s a practice of decay, yes, of celebrating decay, of welcoming decay, yes?

Shaun: Yes. So important to the overall ecosystem to leave the biomass that falls inside of our yards because it’s feeding nutrient cycles. But that’s with a caveat. So if you have a giant oak tree and a full-sun meadow that you’ve planted and cared for, and you have toadflax growing in there and short milkweeds, those plants can’t really grow through a thick layer of leaf.

So when we are keeping those leaves on our property, we want to make sure they’re ending up in areas that can be utilized as habitat, but also not suppress any of the plant growth, because trees are also fighting off other plants from growing. So part of that leaf fall is to suppress other plants from growing. So we don’t want to utilize that natural cycle and then accidentally interrupt the overall goal that we had for our garden as well.

Margaret: Right. One point that you make in the book that I loved, especially, is that when we’re thinking about making a garden or evolving our garden, if we already have an established one, we should have in mind what organism or a couple of organisms, what creatures we’re intending to welcome the most. Because not everybody wants the same things; not everybody requires the same things. And so to me, that’s really important.

And when I first started making my garden decades ago, I was fascinated by birds and I thought about birds and I noticed, and I had no knowledge really, but I noticed, I mean, I bought a bunch of bird books [laughter], but I noticed that there was a lot of action along the fringes at the edge of the property where the tree line was, where there were also some naturally occurring shrubs and vines and whatever, kind of a tangly areas, the messy areas, that there was a lot of action in there.

And I thought, “Oh, O.K., well, I’m going to make some big shrub borders. I’m going to get a lot of shrubs and especially ones with fruit and especially native ones.” And anyway, so these big sort of, I call them biohedges or shrubberies, whatever they are, I mean, they’re just these wonderful places filled with birds a lot of the time, especially when the fruit is there and filled with pollinators when the shrubs are flowering earlier on.

But I think shrubs are one of the plants, again, we’re all attracted to, “Oh, let’s go get some pollinator plants,” and we think perennials, we think asters and we think Rudbeckia and we think Echinacea and so forth. But I think shrubs are really important too, yes?

Shaun: Yes. Shrubs are one of the major declining vegetation structures in general. So shrub lands are typically not managed for because they’re really difficult to manage, especially on a large scale. And the few places that we find them consistently inside the landscape anymore is energy right of ways where they go and mow every five or six years.

But trying to get big machinery through, it’s typically easier to do that through a meadow, so you mow everything down or really tall trees and you have spaced out open-canopy forests. So adding the shrubs to our landscape is very important because they’re missing from the general landscape. And they do provide host plants for many of our pollinators. They feed a lot of our insects for the native shrubs. And then the berry-producing ones are going to create food resources for our migrating birds in our winter surviving birds as well. Yes.

Margaret: And again, if they’re another layer, like especially adjacent to the edge of if you have large trees and they’re the next layer down, so to speak. Now, if there’s understory trees and then shrubs and herbaceous stuff down below, that edge habitat, that ecotone, is like where the action is a lot of times, both with insects and birds. At least that’s my amateur observation. There’s a lot going on there [laughter] in those layered areas, as opposed to shrub in the middle of a piece of lawn or tree in the middle of a piece of lawn. That’s not so much action.

Shaun: Agreed. Yep. I see that as well. And part of that is that that structure is also creating some wind breaks. So a lot of the insects on windier days can fly in that space because they’re not getting blown away, versus next to that shrub around all that mowed grass when the wind is blowing. If a Perdita bee, one of the smallest bees or the genus of the smallest bees, they probably can’t fly more than 15 miles per hour. So if the winds are above that  they have to be flying in protected spaces while they’re out foraging so they can get back to their nest. Does that make sense?

Margaret: Yes, absolutely. I didn’t think of that, but you’re absolutely right.

We can’t talk about all of this, about what else we should provide other than food, without mentioning water. And the smartest thing I did—and again, completely not knowing what I was doing; I did it selfishly for myself, because I wanted to hear the sound of a little waterfall— but I made two in-ground pools, garden ponds, at the beginning when I first made the place. And I keep them unfrozen; I keep a hole in the ice in each one, so there’s water 365 days a year. And I think that was the smartest thing I ever did. So water, tell us about that, about providing that.

Shaun: Water is incredibly important for all of our animals. And one of the biggest mistakes I see gardeners make is they provide a bird bath and a bird bath only. So a number of our animals like toads, salamanders, a lot of our insects even can’t get up there. So it doesn’t mean-

Margaret: On a pedestal, you mean? A bird bath on a pedestal?

Shaun: Yeah. So at ground level is really important, because that’s where water is naturally provided. And by putting it low down, more animals can access it. And it really helps build up the populations, because organisms can come and get their hydration and then go back into their territories. So we do need to add water. And in the colder winters and stuff, especially where we’ve dammed up the rivers and really affected springs that would typically be providing liquid water in winter, it is a good idea to have some sort of heating device to melt the ice so that animals can still access and drink water.

Margaret: And also I think because, I mean, I have various species of frogs and salamanders that utilize the water, whether for reproduction or at least one life stage is in there even in the winter, if not adults as well. You know what I mean? There’s action in there. There’s life in there, even in the winter. So I don’t want to suffocate them, right? I mean, I don’t want to have no gas exchange, have a solid ice thing over this unnatural little pool that seems like it wouldn’t be a good idea, either.

Shaun: Yes. And typically our self-made or designed pools and ponds are typically not deep enough like they would be in the wild, where if it did freeze over, there would still be enough gas inside of our body. So because our areas are so much smaller, it’s a good idea to make that adjustment so that it allows the gas exchange to continue to happen.

Margaret: The other thing that we didn’t talk about, which I loved is you are an advocate for nooks and crannies [laughter], little hiding places and everything. And I just love that because I’m crazy about amphibians and all my frogs and toad, all my friends, they love those little spaces and I find them in the most peculiar, wonderful spots while they’re just out there; they’re just watching to see who’s going to come around to who can get eaten or whatever. But nooks and crannies is really important too, yes?

Shaun: Yes. And in the book I talk about how a lot of the large animals that are no longer inside of our landscapes really helped create a lot of those nooks and crannies, either by bears rolling over logs, or armadillos pushing things over. They stop the soil from sealing against a lot of these objects. So if we intentionally create ground-level shelters or underground shelters that mimic burrows, we’re able to provide the resources that so many of the wildlife that are still present inside of our neighborhoods and inside of our pollinator gardens can utilize and carry out their lifecycles that we might not be considering if we just think about what does this animal need on an overall annual timescale that they do. We just don’t have the data. We haven’t thought about it, right?

Margaret: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot to be learned in “Natural Habitats & Wildlife Gardening,” your new book. Thank you, Shaun, for making time today, and thank you for the book.
(All photos from “Natural Habitats & Wildlife Gardening” by Shaun McCoshum, published by Princeton University Press.)

enter to win a copy of ‘natural habitats & wildlife gardening’

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the March 30, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).