Habitat Hero 2025 Winner Karen Mullin

While we are talking about trees, let’s meet our newest Habitat Hero winner Karen Mullin.  She and her family moved into a newly constructed home on Highview Dr in 2018.  Right away she knew she wanted to preserve the trees on the property and take out lawn to install native plant ‘rivers’ filled with wildflowers to support pollinators and create biodiversity. She has sunny to shady areas where she has been able to plant a variety of species in her yard. She has been working to clear invasive English ivy, oriental bittersweet and other nasty invasive species from the backyard. She has made progress, and as she goes, she plans on adding native plants.

Karen created a brush pile in the back of the yard where she often sees birds looking for insects, but it has also created its own life cycle.  She noticed she had a mole problem, lots of tunnels in the yard, but instead of putting out poison to kill the moles she let nature take care of the “pests”— hawks began to visit the brush pile and eat the moles, she suspects a few foxes stopped by as well!  If she had poisoned those moles, the hawks would have been killed too by eating a poison-filled mole.

Her yard is filled with asters and goldenrods supporting fall migrating monarchs, milkweed for their caterpillars to munch on, monarda (bee balm), foamflower, coneflower, black eyed Susan’s, narrow leaf sunflowers, foxglove beardtongue, coreopsis, ferns, and switch grass.  The trees she has nurtured include sycamore, river birch, red oak, willow oak, flowering dogwood, pagoda dogwood, locust, maple, eastern red cedar and sassafras.

The work and safe practices that Karen has done in her yard has created a biodiverse environment that local fauna can complete their lifecycles in and around.  Thanks, Karen for being a Habitat Hero and great steward of the Cape!