Free Fertilizer from Wildlife

When I watch great flocks of songbirds descend on my Food Forest, singing their joyous feasting chorus, I think to myself, "Well I guess I missed harvesting the Autumn Olives this year..."
However, mostly I am delighted to see the wild creatures enjoying the fruits of my (minimal) labor.
It makes me feel happy that my gardening efforts can benefit birds, insects, mammals, et al.

I wonder though, when my pragmatism acts up, how much fertilizer those wild critters are bringing to my garden and food forest.
I don't do much in the way of adding outside inputs, yet the food outputs are still quite satisfactory.

I think perhaps the value of the wildlife droppings is more than a trifling thing... what do you think?

One time years ago in Georgia, I visited a grove of bamboo that had been used as a night roost by an enormous flock of overwintering blackbirds, which collect in southern Georgia for the winter.  After a month or so of massive numbers of birds roosting there every night, the entire area was a couple of inches deep in guano, and here and there a dead bird.  I gathered up a few buckets full to take back to my gardens.  Being evergreen and wind proof, it is no wonder it was a favorite spot to shelter.  I've never wondered ever since at how bamboo can grow so vigorously even in worthless red clay.

Really not sure what contributions the birds here make to the fertilizer load, but I certainly gather up the contributions from the 'roos.  It's fine in potted plants, since it's fairly fibrous, and also broadcast about the garden.

Yes, every little dropping helps.  Mother Natures way of giving treats to her children.

Unfortunately, the wildlife also fertilizes places that we might not appreciate.

Like the raccoon who like to fertilize any mats we might have outside.  I always wonder if he/she was a pet that was trained to pee pads ....

Watching the spread of pokeweed on my property from a single random sprout last year to several spots this year has been enjoyable. Pokeweed seeds seem to germinate best after they have been through the digestive system of a bird. The several spots on my property also coincide with frequented visited spots by various songbirds throughout the day. How much do they contribute? I'm unsure of that but I do know it is something that didn't require me to lift a finger!

I really prize when rabbits visit my property. I have developed a way to keep them out of my tender vegetables but they have access to my more hardy spaces. Rabbit Manure have a lot of benefits for the garden which I welcome happily.

I see my food forest and my entire farm as a wildlife sanctuary.  I welcome all kinds of animals here, including some that other people might not like. Free fertilizer is great- especially from the turkeys and deer. My neighbor's cattle sometimes get loose here and leave some nice poop which I use in the orchard.

Two summers ago there was a bear here that would sneak over the fence where it was damaged and get into the orchard down near the barn. The bear would always clean up all the wormy apples on the ground and leave lots of poop to fertilize the fruit trees in return. I haven't seen the bear recently and I kind of miss him!

That is another interesting aspect, Timothy!  Sometimes what the wildlife bring is not fertilizer.
I am often surprised by the new additions of volunteer plants that pop up in the landscape, brought in by wild birds or other critters.

Sometimes this is quite a delight, when they are herbs and flowers and trees that I know have food/medicine/beauty value for me.
Squirrels seem to want to turn this place into a forest of Filberts (Hazelnuts, if you must).
My free-roaming pig plants Plums and Cherries quite a lot too, which thrive here.

However, the birds also spread Himalayan/Armenian Blackberries near and far - especially along fencelines - which can be problematic and create more work for me.
Overall, I welcome the work of wildlife in the landscape I steward, even if it's sometimes counter to my plans.

Squirrels and jays may seem like a total pain in the ass to us when they steal our peaches and blueberries, but they actually planted the oak, beech, fir, madrone  and chestnut forests back when humans were still monkeys. They forget where they stashed the acorns, seeds and nuts... and voila- new forests are born.

Another benefit of bears pooping in your food forest is that they love to eat manzanita berries and huckleberries, along with delicious mushrooms like white chanterelles, matsutake and queen boletes. Manzanita seeds actually germinate after they pass through a bear's digestive tract. When the seeds germinate, so do the spores from the mycorrhizal mushrooms and a whole new mushroom patch is started underneath the shade of the manzanita and huckleberry bushes. Since these species of mushroom are difficult or impossible for humans to cultivate, the bears are actually better mushroom cultivators than humans. I always see lots of bear poop in my favorite bolete patch on the Oregon coast.

So far I've gotten 4 hazelnut trees here in Salem, OR for free courtesy of local squirrels/bluejays squishing the nuts into our soil. I just move them into an area of our backyard we're turning into a food forest. The best way to get trees!

Some people think the reason the American chestnut succumbed to the blight is that when the passenger pigeon was wiped out, they missed their fertilizer.

A quick search shows bat guano (available for purchase) has an NPK ratio of 7-3-1.

Valuable stuff!  

There's so much value wildlife provides that we don't even think about.  For instance, I just learned a new word:

Chiropterophily.

It means pollination of plants by bats -- we're looking at you, bananas, mangoes, agave, guava and cacao!  So in addition to hunting mosquitoes and fertilizing plants with poop, we get... chocolate!?

Likewise, think about the nutrient cycling function of seabirds' guano or salmon swimming upstream, transferring all these trace elements and bits and bobs that washed into the ocean back up to the mountains.  Amazing.

So then, the question we begin to ask as permaculture designers is how best to provide for these animals' needs so as to best capture all these energy and nutrient flows?  That's a fun question to entertain.