Brush Piles Can Provide Escape Cover For Wildlife A For more nature habitat information Visit these helpful websites: A Plant's Home A Bird's Home A Homesteader's Home
dequate resting and escape cover is critical to ground-nesting birds, rabbits, and other small game. Although living brush is preferable in most cases, you can build brush piles to supply immediate shelter where natural cover is limited. Artificial brush piles conceal and protect wildlife from predators and the weather. They also establish a medium for seed germination and plant growth. Construction of brush piles has most often been recommended for management of the bobwhite quail and cottontail rabbit. Brush piles constructed for game animals also will be used by many nongame species. Cover provided by the brush pile must be dense enough to protect wildlife and yet allow animals to easily run inside. Suitable locations for brush piles include open fields and range land, fence corners, field edges, gullies, between a stream and a marsh, woodland borders, near woodlands being cleared or thinned, and other sites adjoining feeding and nesting cover. Brush piles help to prevent erosion and provide wildlife cover when placed along the head of a gully, but never place them in the middle of an eroding wash. They may also be appropriate near impoundments, stock ponds, potholes, and other watering places in open terrain. If you install them adjacent to food plots, they will make the plots more attractive and available to both game and nongame species. Place them at each end of an elongated food plot or where the surrounding area is lacking
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in natural cover. The optimum distance between brush piles is from 200 ft. to 300 ft., but will vary according to site characteristic and target species. You can build brush piles from materials available in the vicinity of a site. Oak, locust, and other rotresistant trees make durable bases. Other suitable materials include large stumps, cull logs, old fence posts, large stones, metal grills supported by cinder blocks, and tractor tires. You may use small trees and limbs of almost any species as filler material. Put the largest material on the bottom and ad layers at right angles to one another. Then add small trees, limbs, and branches as filler over the base so that the center is very dense, but the edges are loose. This will shelter the wildlife and still allow them to easily come and go. When using woody material, the base should consist of sturdy trunks or limbs at least 6 in. in diameter. A brush pile for quail should be 6 ft. to 7 ft. tall and 24 ft. to 36 ft. in diameter. For rabbits, the brush pile should be 4 ft. to 7 ft. tall and 10 ft. to 20 ft. wide. In areas cleared of natural wildlife cover, it is best to build at least three or four brush piles per acre. To help conceal wildlife traveling along woodland borders, place a brush pile every 200 to 300 feet. You may want to keep brush piles away from your house and buildings as they will attract woodchucks, skunks, and snakes – all of which may become household pests. Brush piles may also conceal predators. Keep them away from bird feeders located on or near the ground.
WindStar Wildlife Institute is a national, non-profit, conservation organization whose mission is to help individuals and families establish or improve the wildlife habitat on their properties. For more information or for the name of a Master Wildlife Habitat Naturalist in your area, please contact: WindStar Wildlife Institute E-mail: wildlife@windstar.org http://www.windstar.org
Š WindStar Wildlife Institute
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