As well as attracting lots of wildlife to your garden, a wildlife garden also gives you an excuse to be a bit lazy with the gardening from time to time! It isn’t just about bird boxes and ponds; just as important are areas of unkempt garden and piles of logs and sticks.
We don’t have huge garden here, but it is always nice to see wildlife in it so we do various things to attract wildlife. We have several bird feeders offering peanuts, seeds and fat balls. We have a few areas of unkempt garden with wild flowers and grasses growing in them. We have a little nest box on one of the trees at the bottom of the garden.
As far as maintenance goes, then we try to leave dead seed heads and such like for a while before cutting them back. In fact we try to leave most cutting back until spring. We keep the use of pesticides and other chemicals to a minimum. We also have piles of dead wood, compost bins and heaps of sticks all of which help attract wildlife.
It does work too. We have had 24 species of bird to the garden, frogs, toads and newts, numerous butterflies and moths, grass snakes, and as far as mammals go, hedgehog, rabbit, squirrel, mice, bats and even a ferret!
If you want to know how wildlife friendly your garden is and get more hints and tips then Natural England have set up a website called the Big Wildlife Garden. You can add you garden to it and list the features that you have. Our garden is on there and the latest few things we have done mean we have 53 points and a gold certificate! I think I need to build a bird bath next.
How does your garden fare?
As I was rigging my windsurf kit up on the edge of the dunes here at Ynyslas yesterday, a big squall hit with 40 knot winds and heavy rain. I sat there huddled over my kit as a stoat ran out from the grass, sheltered under my sail for a few seconds and then scurried off into the grass again.
I haven’t seen a stoat in the dunes before, so that’s another species to add to my list!
Copyright Keven Law
Blue Tits on a feeder
Although we live in a rural location surrounded by countryside, we don’t get a huge variety of birds to our feeders. It isn’t surprising really as the countryside around is is fairly sparse. There are few trees, and the ones that do grow are small and stunted and the number of different habitats that we do have are fairly specialised. There isn’t much in the way of cover for most birds so it is always nice when we see something a little unusual.
Yesterday we spotted a woodpecker in the garden. I only saw it in flight and then perched on a telegraph pole and it was silhouetted the whole time so I’m not sure which type it was, but it was definitely a woodpecker so that’s one we can add to our garden list.
It did prompt me to try writing a list of birds we have seen in the garden. So, in approximate order of ‘abundance’ here they are:
- Starling
- Sparrow
- Chaffinch
- Blue Tit
- Blackbird
- Robin
- Magpie
- Great Tit
- Jackdaw
- Collared Dove
- Dunnock
- Pied Wagtail
- Crow
- Song Thrush
- Swallow
- Gold Finch
- Wren
- Wood Pigeon
- Red Kite
- Linnet
- Redwing
- Chiffchaff
- Cuckoo
- Sparrowhawk
- Skylark
- Snipe
- Woodpecker
- Curlew
- Grey Heron
I am trying to feed the birds a little more this year and we have a nesting box and a few other wildlife friendly features in the garden. At the moment it has resulted in an increased number of birds to the garden, but the species count is still quite low.
My next project will be to get decent photos of them all.
Although living in a rural location, there is little tree cover nearby and therefore the variety of birds we get in the garden is fairly limited.
Over the last few weeks we have had some new visitors though in the form of a pair of Linnets. These small finches are partial migrants to the UK and about the same size as a sparrow, but the males have a distinctive red head and breast. They certainly seem to be enjoying the forget-me-not seeds and I finally managed to take some photos of them the other day.
