How are holly bushes helpful to wild life?

Answer 1

I can speak for the holly bushes in my own front yard. Every summer, they host a couple of cardinal nests, and the prickly leaves are a nice protection against would-be nest predators such as grackles, crows, and snakes. During the winter, they maintain their leaves and are a great protection for small flocks of birds that eat from our bird feeders. We have a resident cooper's hawk that swoops in from time to time to capture and feed on the Songbirds that use the bird feeders, and the holly is probably one of their best refuges. Both male and female hollies produce flowers, which are very abundant for quite a long time in the spring and summer, and we witness a huge variety of pollinators visiting these flowers for a nectar meal. In the process the pollinators end up transferring pollen from male plants (which produce only pollen bearing flowers) to female plants (which produce only carpel bearing flowers) which produces a fruit, the holly berry. These very pollinators of holly may be kept from starving by the steady production of holly flowers, and then may go on to pollinate crops or rare plants that don't have such sustained flowering. In this way, hollies could be playing a much larger role in nature than you might suspect, especially given the worldwide honeybee decline! Holly leaves can be used as food by some species of caterpillars, which themselves can be food for birds or other wildlife (if they don't make it to metamorphosis into moths or butterflies, which are themselves important pollinators). Finally, and probably the most commonly understood role that hollies play, is via the production of holly berries (female plants only), which are food to birds and other wildlife like squirrels and mice. I have often suspected that hollies are very important to wildlife, and this is why we have not cut down our holly bushes, even though they have become a bit large and unwieldy for the space where they were originally planted. I think we'll keep them!