WILD GARDENS

Wild Gardens

There is a new wildlife series on the BBC narrated by Sir David Attenborough reveals the secret lives of the Garden , its available on the BBC i player now, so i decided to reintroduce my wild and secret garden….

So what happens in the urban garden and what wildlife visits , in particular my urban garden. Now I don’t live in some kind of urban utopia with wildlife wandering throughout my pretty normal urban garden. At first glance the wildest creature venturing across my lawn is next door’s cat Zeus. The garden is quite unremarkable , a couple of fruit trees , a bushy border , a couple of small shallow ponds ( more of a fancy puddle than a pond ) and a central grass lawn. In total it’s about 150sq metres or 600sq feet in size.

We have a few wildlife friendly features built into the garden , a bird bath , as mentioned a couple of shallow small ponds , a hedgehog house or two ( actually i can count 5 ! ) and a couple of bird feeders. And i. Almost forgot the nut box for the squirrels. So apart from the Zeus the cat and his brother Orbit who else visits the garden ?

One of the small wildlife ponds

Well during the day it’s as you would expect , garden bird species and the local gang of Grey Squirrels. Most of the visiting birds are Great tits , Blue tits and Robins. Then we have Pigeons and Magpies. Other birds do occasionally come in to the garden , but not that often.

As dusk approaches and the birds return to their roosts and the Squirrels head home the garden changes to the night shift , the nocturnal mammals. Now i know we have a couple of mice living in the garden but they are not the only residents here who enjoy the darker hours. As the light fades the Hedgehogs emerge from the little houses scattered around the garden. We currently have three living in the garden and these are joined by a couple of locals who come for the free food left out for them.

The hedgehogs have their own pub the Hibernation Arms

Nationally the hedgehog is in serious decline but we seem to have a healthy local population. It maybe due to the interconnected gardens in our street or maybe the quiet road we live on. We also don’t have any Badgers locally , so the luck hedgehogs don’t have to contend with any natural predication. But the hogs don’t have the garden all to themselves . They share it with our apex predator here in the UK the red Fox. In my humble opinion a beautiful creature and a welcome visitor. Intelligent , curious and in no way a threat to humans. They serve as a kind of natural pest control.

So who visits your garden ?