A few years ago, we bought a house with a pool here in North Carolina. Our property is in the woods with mostly pines but also crepe myrtles, oaks, and one struggling magnolia. We keep our pool chemicals as low as possible since wildlife likes to drink from the pool, especially dragonflies. We have bird baths and bee cups for birds and insects. To keep down mosquitoes, I built a dragonfly habitat and added a mosquito dunk that only hurts the mosquitoes and nothing else. It worked! We've had three times as many dragonflies this year and they've feasted on mosquitoes and more! We also have many butterflies and moths, some bees, and about 15 types of birds that I've recorded on my Merlin app so far. We're planning to replace the many non-native plants we inherited with native plants, but this will take time. Our next goal is to replace our butterfly bush with a native plant that is equally appealing to pollinators.
We don't use pesticides, so Japanese Stiltgrass (?) has taken over this year. We've started removing it by hand. We're also trying to figure out what to do with our drainage field. (We're on well water plus septic). We can't build anything on it, but perhaps we could turn it into a wildflower meadow? Again, the 'how' is what we're trying to figure out. And we worry about creating more places for copperheads to hide. My friend and my dog were both bitten by them, so we'd like to keep them at bay.
Open to any suggestions. :)