Even small gardens are full of wild animals, pets and wildlife. True, the animals concerned are mostly very small – beetles, spiders, ladybirds and hundreds of other mini-beasts without English names – but they are all important. Each is part of a very complex food web. Most obviously, invertebrates provide food for many birds, even seed-eating birds like house sparrows feed their young on grubs and insect larvae.
Most of us like to see birds in our garden. However, we don’t usually give much thought to why they are there or how we might attract more. Try and look at your own garden as a bird would! What does it have to offer? Birds need places to feed, breed, rest and nest. Gardeners can help with all of these.
Artificial bird feeders. are especially useful in the winter when natural food can be scarce. Many species will eat peanuts but sunflower seed and niger seed are also favourites. Robins, pied wagtails, blue tits and great tits are just some of the more common species that will use nest boxes. but you can also now buy them for house martins, treecreepers and even tawny owls and kestrels. Some species use boxes to shelter from cold weather – wrens, especially, will crowd into them, their shared body heat helping them to survive frosty winter nights.
Gardeners can help birds in less obvious ways, too. Plant shrubs that will offer food, shelter and natural nest sites. Hawthorn and blackthorn provide all of these – and their thorns and spines also deter human and larger furry intruders! Pyracantha berries are popular with blackbirds and thrushes and with the blackcap, a small warbler that now winters in some suburban gardens.
Making your garden more attractive to wildlife certainly doesn’t mean letting it turn into an overgrown wilderness. As with every other garden, you need careful planning to try and get what you want. Create different habitats that both you and the wildlife can enjoy – perhaps a pond, a hedge underplanted with native bluebells or a rockery as a safe haven for newts and frogs when they’ve left the pond. If you’re worried about the safety aspect of open water, consider a bog garden instead of a pond.
Notcutts garden centres can offer everything the wildlife gardener wants: advice and help, pond liners, bird feeders and nest boxes – just one family of blue tits in your garden will consume huge numbers of greenfly and blackfly. Notcutts also have artificial homes for gardeners’ allies like bees, birds and hedgehogs as well as the lacewings and ladybirds that, like blue tits, will also eat thousands of aphids.