My Big Garden Birdwatch

 Those of you who read my post about the birdfeeders in our garden (15/12/21) will not be surprised to learn that the results for our hour of The Big Garden Birdwatch were unspectacular. On Friday I was away. Saturday was too windy. This morning i was otherw1se engaged. So 12.20-1.20 it was.

These were the birds seen. One robin turned up at once and was pleased to get at the scattered mealworms first. It was closely followed by a male blackbird, which preferred the fat sprinkles. We usually get half a dozen sparrows every morning, but this time there were just three. Because of old eyes I use binoculars to check, even at this short distance, and was glad to confirm a dunnock; I do like them a lot, so neat and unassuming. A blue tit made such a brief visit - a quick snatch of a sunflower heart, that I nearly missed it. I did miss something similar, for it came and went before I could get focused; it may have been a coal tit, but I did not enter it in my records.

After 40 minutes a fluffy black and white cat came over the fence. It withdrew before I could get my water-pistol pointed. Had it been a dog I could have pursued the owner, but cats are above the law.

Wood pigeons are regulars with us. During this hour there were three. In fact five minutes after the hour was over there were four - but not listed. I expected two magpies, but only one came. I wonder whether its companion has met with an accident.

And that was it. Not very exciting; but I do enjoy watching even these familiar birds. The Garden Birdwatch is not a competition as to who has the most, or the most exotic, but a scientific survey where accurate data is everything. If I want exotic I can walk less than ten minutes and hope to see dippers, goosanders, grey wagtails and a kingfisher. But the Water of Leith does not, I hope, run through our property even in flood. 

The Pond

 I think that every garden should have some sort of water feature. A wild pond is hard to beat. As soon as we moved into our new house I dug a pond. I shall refer occasionally to the pond at our old house, because I do urge those of you who have space to make a bigger one than I have now. The old one was about 3 metres by four metres. My present one is 1 metre by 1.9 metres.

The Pond

You can see that it is not very ambitious, but I am pleased with it and it adds enormously to the wildlife garden. Here are some photos of it being made. 

Turf cut away.

It's important to get the sides level

I bought too much liner. But better than too little

Not finished, but already in use.

The New Pond

This all happened in 2017. As you can see, it was used at once by birds for bathing. Sparrows, blackbirds and starlings use it quite a lot in the summer.

The plants shown on the diagram were bought that first summer. They were all planted into aquatic compost in the bottom of the pond, not left in pots. They may move around a bit to find the depth they like, and their roots may be a useful habitat for invertebrates. The most important plants are the two oxygenators, Hornwort and Spiked milfoil. The other really important thing is the snails. We brought in a few from a large lake in a park, and there are now dozens. They help keep the water clear of algae by grazing on it every spring.

Pond snails among the Hornwort

One the irritating things about some wildlife garden writers is the way they assure readers that, if only they prepare the right habitat, wildlife will definitely arrive. Well, at our old house (nearer the city centre) a frog was sitting in the pond the day after it was filled - like the sparrows here - and palmate newts soon turned up as well. Apart from anything else they liked eating tadpoles. Here, after two years, there were no signs of any amphibians, so I imported a little frogspawn. It takes two years for frogs to reach breeding age, but in the spring of 2021 this happened.

Frogspawn

Several of the tadpoles eventually emerged as little frogs, so we hope they are the start of a successful population. 

This is January. My plan is that, as the year goes on, I shall be able to show you flowers and invertebrates and frogs. If you have room for a larger pond... Well, at the old house we had a pair of Mallard ducks mating most years (and once for a day some ducklings). We also often had a heron arrive. I once saw it eat three frogs in ten minutes, so I tried to provide a sheltered spot, under chicken wire. We do not have room for a heron here, though last summer one did perch on the garage roof and studied the problem, before deciding that our space was a bit too enclosed for a large bird.

Yesterday I removed dead leaves from the water and my fingers froze. There's a good deal of clearance work to do before the end of February (I am not planning to make a swamp) but I am hoping for slightly warmer water. 

Foxes tonight

 

So far my posts on this wildlife garden blog have been general background, and I have a few more of those planned. But here is an up-to-date item of the sort I hope to get onto later, when things start to move in the spring. But nature won’t wait.

 

Tonight at about 9.30pm I happened to notice that something had switched on the safety light at the back of the house. You know the sort of thing – to deter intruders. I guessed there might be a fox, so I cautiously raised a blind. There was a fine big fox. But then out of the shadows came another, smaller. I was enjoying watching them snuffling at the pond, which is surely frozen, when there emerged from a corner a third, of the smaller size. My guess is that it was a mother and two younger ones. Then the light went out.

 

Urban foxes are common round here – and in many places. Their determined burrowing, and tendency to leave droppings scattered about can make them a nuisance. Their biggest nuisance value in our garden is their appetite for any fruit that happens to be within reach. One took pears off the lower branches a couple of summers ago.

This summer they stripped almost all the plums off our little tree, even breaking down some branches (the tree is very young and growing) in the process.

I am also fairly certain it was a fox that pulled a plant out of the pond, pot and all (I had not yet got round to planting it), presumably searching for grubs. 

About a mile away, on the edge of some woodland, badgers occasionally come into gardens. I would be thrilled to see one, but I think they could be seriously destructive of a town garden if in the mood. I'll settle for foxes. I'll see in the morning if they have made their presence felt.

Bird feeders

 When we bought this house, with small garden, about four years ago my present to myself was a bird-feeder - one of those ones with arms for hanging things from. Here are some thoughts.

We had very few birds visiting between June and November this year. This month, however, I have started feeding again. This includes a daily scattering of a few "suet sprinkles!" and a few mealworms, so that the ground feeders get a share. Immediately today two magpies swooped down and ate the lot. Even the wood pigeons were too slow off the mark. The ground-feeders I like to see are dunnock, robin and blackbird; and they do appear with reasonable frequency. But this episode does reinforce the general point that the wildlife gardener had better not discriminate between types of wildlife. Sweet, colourful, attractive or uncommon creatures - well, they are attractive. But it is not, I suggest, for us to discriminate. 

The feeders, just before a major cleaning and refilling session.

The regular birds just now (in small numbers) include nothing uncommon or "special". But I get great pleasure seeing coal tits and sparrows. In fact it is not long since the disappearance of sparrows from our gardens was a worry. We seem to have a good number nearby who visit us regularly. I think the number of privet hedges around - in our case not privet, but some thick bushes - and their fairly omnivirous habit has got them going again. Good.

You are not, in a small garden, going to get birds arriving that are not in the locality. I was recently very jealous at a friend's house. She backs onto some old woodland and her garden birdlife was much more exciting than mine. We have had long-tailed tits fairly often, as the flocks roam around. A sparrow hawk has occasionally sat on the fence, thinking. A heron was seen on the garage roof when the pond was full of frogs but I think it decided against coming to ground level.

The big disappointment just now is that we have not seen a goldfinch for a while. Sometimes they have been regulars, and sometimes in the nesting season there has been a whole family. But none for weeks. I hope this is temporary; the niger seed awaits in its special feeder. Mind you, observing local migration (I don't mean going to Africa) is interesting, though it is less jolly when attractive birds are away. There always seems to be a rush of starlings at nesting time and none before or after that. 

When goldfinches do arrive, they are the prettiest thing in the garden

One thing I have noticed is that the birds are quite choosy. I have given up supplying peanuts at all, because they would be left untasted. This is in contrast to the feeder in our church garden, in the middle of the city, where we offer nothing but peanuts , and they are popular enough. At the moment the expensive sunflower hearts have all been eaten while the general purpose bird seed is untouched.

You will notice in the photos (I don't have the gear to take good bird photos - sorry) that the feeders are "squirrel proof". Grey squirrels can be attractive in a town garden, but they eat much too much for me to buy for them. To the domestic gardener their taste for digging up bulbs, and for taking one bite out of apples, is pretty irritating, though they are less irritating than neighbours' cats. In the country, though, they are a serious menace. The massive decline in red squirrels - mainly because of a virus, I believe, though also competition for food - is directly attributable to the spread of greys. And for any sort of commercial forestry - sustainable forestry is of the greatest importance - their taste for the bark of deciduous trees is very serious indeed.

This jolly fat-feeder was given me years ago. It isn't squirrel-proof. Fingers crossed!

Talking of viruses reminds me to urge you to wash your feeders regularly - say once a month. This is a bore; please invent an easily washable feeder someone. But the shortage of greenfinches is the direct result of viral infections spread from feeders. So get going with soap and water and an old toothbrush.

The best thing you can do for birds is provide habitats, natural food, and water. I love to see blackbirds pulling worms out of the lawn, sparrows and starlings splashing in the  pond, tits picking insects off the apple trees and even wood pigeons gorging themselves on the cotoneaster berries I had liked looking at. But bird-feeders that are kept clean certainly have a place in a town garden and watching them can be a treat. 

Three very good books for wildlife gardeners

 In my previous blog-post I referred to "who knows what invertebrates". One person who did know what was Jennifer Owen. Her book "Wildlife of a garden: a thirty year study" is highly recommended. 

She had the knowledge and the skill do make a detailed study of all the animal life in her garden, in a suburb of Leicester. There are various detailed tables in the book, full of fascinating information. Do get hold of a copy and read them. Suffice it to say that she found numerous varieties of invertebrates: butterflies - 23; moths - 375 (over 100 of these recorded once only); hoverflies - 94; bees and wasps - 121; sawflies, psocids, bugs and lacewings - 305; beetles - 421; other insects - 625; other invertebrates - 138. These numbers astonished me when I first read them. She also tells us the annual fluctuations. The book is also beautiful to look at, with many fine colour photos on every page. The two final chapters, "The Garden Habitat" and "Gardens as Conservation" are richly rewarding to every would-be wildlife gardener. One most interesting point is that the garden studied is, like all cultivated gardens, in a constant state of development. Digging, pruning, harvesting, and the control of aggressive weeds means that there is a great variety of plants, and of sizes of plants at different stages of growth. "The creation of a state of permanent succession is thus a source of further enrichment of the fauna." The garden is a "neat, productive suburban garden". The key sentence for us humble gardeners with no pretensions to being ecologists is "Above all, and of paramount importance in a wildlife garden, no pesticides or other noxious chemicals are used, other than the occasional application of slug pellets". Personally I manage without the slug pellets, though I do not attempt much vegetable growing. 

A more recent book, published in 2019, is "The Garden Jungle or Gardening to Save the Planet" by Dave Goulson. Professor Goulson is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex. 

Dave Goulson is not only a distinguished academic, he is also a witty, fluent writer whose style is easy to read and whose books are deservedly popular. He is also a hard-hitting advocate against all sorts of aspects of horticulture and of farming that are damaging our planet and the life that inhabits it. Do read the whole book. Here is one set of extracts.

 

"If, like me, you've ever succumbed to the temptation to buy these plants [sometimes using the Royal Horticultural Society's 'Perfect for Pollinators' logo] you may be concerned by the results of research performed in my lab...The results were depressing. Most of the plants contained a cocktail of pesticides...Only two out of twenty-nine plants that we tested contained no pesticides...Seventy percent of the plants contained neonicotinoids (insecticides that are notorious for their harmful effects on bees and long persistence in the environment)... Our results were published in the spring of 2017 and caused quite a stir... Luckily the Friends of the Earth campaign gained real traction and very soon most of the big-name chains had all agreed to withdraw neonics."

I thought this passage was worth quoting at length. But there are other chapters about meadows, ponds, moths, ants and so on. At the end of the book find "My sixteen favourite garden plants for pollinators" and "My top twelve berry plants for birds". 

The final book in this post is very special to me, because it was Chris Baines who got me started on wildlife gardening. In the 1980s he presented a series of television programmes on how to make a wildlife garden, which I previously knew nothing about. His "Companion to Wildlife Gardening" derives directly from those programmes.

I bought the book-of-the-series in 1985. But I was given this new edition as a present more recently. It came out in 2016. It is another easy read, packed with encouraging and useful advice. It is also full of beautiful photographs. In the cold and dark of a sleet-filled Edinburgh (right now) what better to relax with it in a comfy chair and dream of all the things you are going to do next to make your garden even more attractive to wildlife?

A much smaller wildlife garden

 I set up this blog years ago, when we enjoyed a pretty large garden. Since then we have downsized, as old people do. But the wonderful "The Wild Gardener" programmes on BBC2 recently, by Colin Stafford-Johnson, included the following sentence: "Anyone who's got a little bit of land can make the land better for nature". [BBC iPlayer - The Wild Gardener - Series 1: Episode 1] So I decided to make a new series of posts about what I do in my little bit of land. I shall enjoy making these posts. If you enjoy reading them, that's very pleasing. If you get some ideas from them of things to try in your own bit of land, so much the better.

The day I decided to start (November 29th) has snow on the ground and was very cold. Here are a few photos.

I think these are blackbird footprints. Certainly I have seen both a male and a female hopping around this week.

The Purple loosestrife is one of the plants that does really well in the little pond. I hope next summer to show it in flower. But it was shining gold in the the afternoon sun, a reminder that seed-heads are often an aesthetic pleasure as well as a winter home for who knows what invertebrates. (I use the phrase "who knows" to confess right away that I have no scientific knowledge. Some people do know.)

Providing habitats is one of the main principles of wildlife gardening. I have little skill in do-it-yourself, but I did manage to make this insect house earlier this year. I have no idea what, if anything, will use it, but all sorts of insects hibernate, so I hope some creatures find it useful.

I reckon that four things all of us who have any land at all can do are: provide habitats; set up a bit of water - ideally a pond, however small it has to be; never use pesticides; never use herbicides. Maybe other ideas will come across from this blog. We'll see what turns up.

My main reason for wildlife gardening is sheer pleasure. I love living in the city, but I love being in the country. A sight like this cheers me up.

Painting in the Wild-life Garden

Yesterday I went to The Scottish Gallery and looked at their Flora Depicta exhibition (here's the link: http://www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/exhibitions/page/flora_depicta ). This inspired me to try and do some flower painting myself. I wanted to try and capture something of our wild-life garden.

I chose a spot which is a glorious tangle of vegetation. I know my limitations; no chance of precise botanical drawing. But I did want to capture the atmosphere of the spot, and have something which will remind me of it. I chose to try acrylic on "not pressed" watercolour paper. This was the set-up.

The first step was to put on some loose washes of pure red, blue and yellow. These constituted the beginnings of a composition, and they would be a background to all the detail that was to come. You will notice that green was not used. I knew there would be an overwhelming amount of green to come, so I wanted different colours in the background.

Then I took a little bottle of black acrylic ink and did some rough sketching. I was not aiming for precise lines, so I used a twig not a pen. The point was to give myself a composition and some shapes to work with indicating where the main plant stems would be. The twig was just picked up on the spot. It won't worry me at all if some of the marks are visible in the final painting.

The next step was to paint in some dark. There's a wall covered in ivy in the background and soil in the foreground, all heavily shaded.

In retrospect I think I could have put in more dark blue and brown at this stage, but more could be added later.

Now for the hard work,painting a myriad leaves in many different greens. On my palette I put Cadmium Yellow Light, Lemon Yellow, Ultramarine Blue and Cerulean Blue. These gave a lot of different combinations.

Painting the mass of leaves took about an hour. I did not try and draw the outline of individual leaves, but I did look closely at the size of marks and at the amount of yellow or of blue in the greens. I also put.in more shade.  

And finally what I had had in mind from the start. I took a smaller brush and used mixtures of pure red and white for the foxglove flowers. I tried to observe them closely. The same went for the meadowsweet; I found the subtle off-white of these flowers, the frothy look, and the variations of light and shade almost impossibly difficult.

I tidied up a few details here and there, but the fact that I was too tired after two intense hours to do much more at least prevented me making it worse by overworking.