Get tuned in to nature. (General Garden)

Member Name: Flindy

Product:	General Garden
Date:	26/05/01 (524 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Help birds and wildlife

Disadvantages: None

The garden seems like a fairly peaceful, uneventful sort of place. But having watched closely the goings on in my garden, I can tell you that there is high drama, tragedy, and intrigue going on under our very noses.

This time of year the garden sees the most activity in terms of bird life, many young will have just fledged and are still hanging around mum and dad cadging meals. Sparrows in particular can be seen begging for food from their diligent parents, always ready with open beaks and fluttering wings. Blackbirds on the other hand are hiding in shrubs and trees, as they are not able to fly straightaway after leaving the nest, and so are still fairly vulnerable to attack from cats or birds of prey. Their parents take them regular meals, and you can see them on the lawn, head cocked to one side as they spy a potential meal, worms beware! Blackbirds may have two or three broods a year, and can start nest building as early as February.

Blue tits and other members of the tit family are busy feeding their young making several hundred trips a day during the last week before their young fledge, the parents are looking a little bedraggled by now, with little time to spare for grooming themselves. Blue tits usually leave the security of nest or nest box in the first week in June; this is pretty general wherever they are in the UK.

The House Martins are just beginning to build their nests of mud under the eaves of the house roof, amazing how they make their journey every year covering thousands of miles, and arrive at the same spot to breed as they did last last year!

The slugs are out in force every night when it is dark, wreaking havoc on young tender plants, and decimating hostas if they are given half a chance. Try not to use harmful methods to control slugs, because you could also be harming the frogs who eat slugs or the Thrushes who eat the snails. The problem with trying to control pests chemically is that the pest is foo
d for something else, and you cannot be totally selective. Slug pellets are coloured blue to make them unattractive to birds, but residue can still find it's way into the soil and around plants. There are "safe" pellets available, I think Septico in Wolverhampton make a safe version.

If you have a slug problem you could also use special traps, which are on sale at garden centres, designed so that only slugs can get inside. These traps used in conjunction with lots of grit around plants will keep slugs under control. It is an expensive exercise, but if you care about wildlife you will think it worth the cost.

If you are keen on birds and like them to come to your garden, I would advise not to have cats, I love cats, I have a conflict of interest between cats and birds but the birds win! Although I don’t own a cat there is a stray who keeps coming into the garden, and two weeks ago when we had been out, she had killed what we think was a Blue Tit. The blue feathers edged with yellow were on the lawn under a tree, no sign of any bones etc, we can only assume that Mary (that’s the name we gave her) had eaten the whole bird. For a while there was panic, as we have a nesting pair of blue tits in a box, and we were relieved to see our two coming and going later that day. Then we realised that although our pair were ok, somewhere there was a blue tit missing a mate.

It is not sensible to get over emotional about incidents such as this, as birds get killed all the time by predators, but the domestic cat is responsible for the loss of many birds each year. So if you have a cat, why not try to get it used to wearing a collar with a bell on, at least birds will be aware of its movements!

Another incident happened when young blackbirds left the nest which was built in a conifer tree in our garden, next to the pond! One of the young had fallen into the pond and drowned, again we were not in the garden that
day, if we had been you can be sure I would have been trying to rescue the young bird! :-) Only a few hours earlier I had gone into the garden after hearing the adult Blackbirds alarm call, this is a loud and urgent “chip” “chip” sound, a certain sign that there is a threat. Sure enough, a young blackbird was sitting helplessly in the corner of the flower border, with Mary only feet away and ready to pounce, the parent birds were hopping about looking really agitated and making a din. I must admit that I put the cat in the shed for the afternoon, to at least give the birds time to find a concealed place to roost for the night.

So if you spend a little time looking and listening when you are out of doors, you will soon become tuned in to the drama going on all around you. You will then be able to do your bit and give nature a helping hand.

The web site for the Royal Society for the protection of birds www.rspb.com/ this web site also gives other wildlife related information.

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