What America Actually Wants From Its Backyard Animals

What people want, by animal

Each bar is the share of that animal’s classified search volume. Someone asking how long squirrels live and someone asking how to repel them are both counted, and the bar shows which is more common.

Three findings worth the headline

1. The squirrel is not the enemy people assume

Squirrels carry the reputation of a garden pest, and the search data does not agree. Of the 73,756 classified monthly searches naming squirrels, nine in ten are people asking how long they live, what to feed them and where they sleep. How long do squirrels live alone runs at 14,800 searches a month — more than every squirrel-removal term in the corpus put together, and where they shelter is not far behind.

2. Deer are forgiven almost everything

Deer do more measurable damage to gardens than any animal on this list, and only about one search in ten is about stopping them. The rest are about attracting and feeding them. That is the widest gap between harm done and hostility shown anywhere in the dataset — though see the caveat below, because deer are also the species this corpus is most likely to flatter.

3. Swimming pools decide which amphibians people tolerate

Frogs and toads eat slugs and mosquito larvae, and are searched for removal 99% of the time. Reading the actual phrases explains it: the dominant terms are about keeping frogs out of swimming pools, not out of gardens. Ducks follow the same pattern. People are not hostile to the animal — they are hostile to it being in the pool.

The numbers behind every bar

Method

The corpus is 43,306 backyard, gardening and animal search terms carrying Google Ads volume estimates. Every term naming exactly one animal was sorted by the language of the phrase into care (lifespan, diet, habitat, attracting, keeping), removal (get rid of, keep away, repel, deter, trap, proof against), danger (bites, disease, whether it can hurt you) or other. Terms naming two animals were discarded rather than guessed at.

An animal is reported only when it clears 5,000 total and 3,000 classified monthly searches. Without that floor, a species with two tagged phrases reads as 0% or 100% and gets quoted as though it were a finding. Bees, wasps and goats were excluded by it.

What this measure cannot tell you

• It is a backyard gardening corpus, not a census of search. Hunting, livestock and professional pest-control terms are under-represented by construction. An animal whose main audience sits outside gardening — deer being the clearest case — reads friendlier here than it would nationally.
• Intent is inferred from wording, not from the person. “What do squirrels eat” is counted as care. Some of those searchers are working out what to stop putting out.
• Volumes are estimates. Google Ads rounds them into bands. They rank species against each other reliably and should not be quoted as absolute counts.

Using this data

The figures on this page are free to quote and republish with attribution to Grow In Backyard and a link to this page. The analysis is reproducible: scripts/research/animal_intent.py produces every number here from the source corpus. For the underlying dataset, a breakdown we have not published, or a comment for a story, email [email protected].

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