Private Lands Wildlife
Your Land.
Your Wildlife
Sanctuary.
Not a park. Not a reservation. Your own property — transformed into thriving wildlife habitat. Free guides for private landowners who want to make a difference.
Private landowners control 70% of wildlife habitat in America — what you do with your land matters
Built for people who own their own land
This isn't about national parks or wildlife refuges. It's about the 5 acres behind your house, the 40-acre farm you inherited, the land you worked for. Every guide here is built around one question: what can you do, on your property, to make it better for wildlife?
Identify what lives there, what they eat, and what they need to thrive through every season.
Owl boxes, bat houses, brush piles, pond restoration — practical projects any landowner can do.
Found a baby squirrel or raccoon? Step-by-step guides for every species until help arrives.
Remove invasives, plant natives, and create the corridors that let wildlife move and thrive.
Baby Squirrels: What to Do When You Find One
Our most-read guide covers everything — what to feed an orphaned baby squirrel, which milk replacer is safe, how to keep them warm, and exactly when you need to call a wildlife rehabilitator. Getting this right in the first hours makes all the difference.
Read the Full Guide →Also trending
🦝The land you own
is the land that matters most
National parks protect less than 12% of America's land. The other 88% is privately owned. What you do with your acres — even just 5 of them — is where the real conservation story is written.
You don't need to be a biologist or own hundreds of acres. A brush pile, a bat house, a pond cleared of invasives — small actions add up to real habitat.
Our 30 acres in Michigan went from overgrown and abandoned to hosting bald eagles, wood ducks, wild turkeys, and 20+ white-tailed deer visiting nightly.
Billy Gruett's Ojibwe heritage taught reciprocity with the land — take only what you need, give back through stewardship. That philosophy drives everything we do.
Before this was a wildlife sanctuary, a boy rode this road
Private Lands Wildlife was founded in Gratiot County, Michigan. While doing habitat restoration and conservation work on our property, history began to surface. Through metal detecting, studying old maps, and digging into local records — a true story unfolded that we never expected to find.
In 1850, a 16-year-old half-Ojibwe boy named Billy Gruett rode this exact road every week for eight years — carrying mail 25 miles through wilderness, swimming flooded rivers with the mailbag held above his head, in conditions that killed grown men. His parents were interpreters between the settlers and the Native tribes. His family is buried alongside the Ojibwe people they served. The 250-year-old oak tree that watched him pass every week still stands on the front of this property today. We built this wildlife sanctuary on his land, in his honor. That tree is still here. So is the road. So is his story.
A True Story
Teach Kids About Wildlife
Personalized Kids Book
Michigan Heritage
Wildlife habitat education for private landowners.
All our wildlife guides are free. Our books, coloring pages, and habitat resources help keep them that way — and so do you when you use our affiliate links, at no extra cost to you.