Sitting on our patio on a gloriously sunny Saturday, I’m very glad we’ve been able to develop a garden that’s really good for wildlife. It’s helped by the woodland behind, but we’ve installed a good array of insect-friendly plants, we have plenty of bushes and trees, we’ve left some scruffy bits to give shelter, and, though we have no pond, there is a stream in the valley below us, so we’re not far from water.
This means we have plenty of bird visitors - currently young blackbirds pursuing their parents and begging for whatever they can get, and coal tits working furiously to keep their young ones fed too, plus a noisy family of jackdaws rampaging through the treetops. I haven’t seen any young blue or great tits yet; sadly our resident nest of blue tits was I think raided by the local pair of woodpeckers, who very probably took all the young just as they prepared to fledge. All that work by the parents came to nothing - but that’s nature, and we do have young woodpeckers at our feeders.
Finches come to us in many shapes and sizes, and I particularly love the two pairs of bullfinches we have around. They mate for life, and we usually see male and female together, even though they must have a nest full of young. Siskins have stayed with us through the summer, and goldfinches are always around too - along with chaffinches and greenfinches of course. Robins are less visible just now - hard at work I imagine. We have two pairs, each of which think their territory includes our feeders, so some serious arguments develop from time to time. We is plenty of floor level browsing space for dunnocks and wrens, and at the moment wrens are often to be seen prospecting the stems of our lovely tree peony.
We have many more bird species, but starlings are only very occasional visitors, and house sparrows, though regularly seen, only visit us from the gardens on the other side of the road, attracted by the fat and seed chunks we put out.
This seems to have been a good summer so far for butterflies and bees, but there aren’t many wasps - I’ve seen only one queen. Last year hornets passed through from time to time along the woodland edge, but none this summer as yet. When it comes to larger creatures, we’re not short of grey squirrels! And we have also seen frogs, a toad, a hedgehog or two, even slow worms. We don’t see these often, but there’ll be others around we never see. You’re never very far from a brown rat, for example.
Among the trees behind us, the elm succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease last summer, so we were surprised when this spring it leafed up and produced flowers. But now the leaves are drooping and shrivelling branch by branch, and I suppose we’ll never again have the great elms we used to know when I was a child. I’ve planted a young elm which I hope will grow to fill its place. While there’s a good mix of trees behind us - ash, sycamore, oak, wild cherry, crab apple, even a yew - I do hope we can manage to keep an elm or two.
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