The lake and the surrounding terrain provide a habitat for a large variety of animals that are native to northern Virginia.  The descriptions below are based on personal observations or reports from usually reliable sources.  Please contribute.

Birds

Aside from the normal compliment of robins, sparrows, finches, etc.  the lake is home to a number of larger birds like heron, pileated woodpeckers, canadian geese, mallard ducks, several types of hawks and at least one bald eagle. Last spring (2003) a cormorant was around for at least a couple of weeks.

Mammals

 A conservative estimate puts the number of squirrels living at Lake Jackson at somewhere around 100 billion (just kidding, but we do have a lot of squirrels, and they eat anything.)  The lake also has it's usual share of foxes, raccoons, and possums.  A number of beavers have lived in the lake in the past and have even caused some problems for lake front homeowners, but they haven't been seen recently (the beavers, not the homeowners).  On spring and summer evenings, bats come in to feast on the bugs over the lake (thank goodness). The most interesting animal in this category is possibly the lake otter who appeared last spring and was seen many times cruising up and down the lake.  This is considered to be a good sign of the relative health of the lake environment since otters are very finicky about where they live.

Amphibians & reptiles

The lake is surprisingly short of frogs, but we do have a large number of turtles who can often be seen sunning themselves in groups of two or three on logs in the shallows.  There are many, many different types of snakes, and they can often be seen swimming across the lake in the summer.

Fish

 The lake contains the usual assortment of sunfish, crappie, large and small mouth bass and catfish.  Since the lake not very large and relatively shallow, they tend not to be too large, but an occasional good sized bass or catfish have been reported.