As the RSPB has noted, wildlife populations cannot thrive if confined to nature reserves alone. The Wildlife Trusts highlight the essential role of Britain’s 430,000 hectares of garden space in promoting a ‘Nature Recovery Network‘. After we arrived in our new home in December 2018, providing a selection of feeds quickly stimulated regular visits by a variety of bird species. However, I wanted to take up the challenge of shifting the balance between artificial and natural attractiveness of the garden to wildlife, as I discussed in a previous post, and create a tiny, self-contained ecosystem.
Construction and planting
The obvious first steps seemed to be to increase the variety of habitats and food sources. The creation of a permanent water source is an easy win — a drinking and bathing facility for birds, potential home for amphibians, dragonflies and damselflies, and an environment for flowering water plants.
The plan was to create a pond with several shelves for marginals, with a deeper central section for cooler water and submerged plants. The shape of the excavation meant that the liner (a synthetic rubber product that is kinder to the environment than the traditional butyl formula) came up slightly short at the ‘beach’ end, limiting the depth of the marginal areas. Although this was disappointing, I’d inadvertently created large shallow bird baths (see below) at each end, which are in intensive use throughout the day.
I contacted the friendly, helpful and knowledgeable owners of Puddleplants, who kindly suggested a customised planting scheme of native perennials for the pond, with a desire to create something as close as possible to a natural pool. We decided upon water forget-me-not, soft rush, marsh woundwort, water mint, marsh marigold, lesser spearwort, watercress, yellow and purple loosestrife, gypsywort, sweet flag, water starwort, willow moss, marsh cinquefoil and a small, red Frobelii water lily. The lily and starworts are contained in pots in deeper water, with all the other plants transplanted into ‘socks’ filled with aquatic compost.
I created a bog garden using a long, thin off-cut of plastic pond liner from a local garden centre, the spoil from the pond excavation and some shingle to allow limited drainage via holes pierced in the liner. The bog is home to primroses, cowslip, water avens, hemp agrimony, devil’s bit scabious, cuckoo flower, meadow sweet and snake’s head fritillary, all also supplied by Puddleplants. In addition, I used a small piece of trimmed liner to create another much smaller, poorly-drained boggy area near our shed for a water figwort plant.
With little knowledge of what had been planted around the garden’s beds by the previous owners, it was a case of seeing what emerges as the season progresses. To ensure greater concentration and diversity of pollen and nectar sources, we went shopping at the wonderful Natural Surroundings wildflower centre in nearby Glandford, where Anne Harrop expertly sorted us out with a selection of insect-magnet perennials for distribution around the garden. These include lavender, Nobel (ornamental red) clover, Verbena, rose campion, dusky cranesbill, hybrid anemone, giant yellow knapweed, catmint, Echinacea, large selfheal and foxglove.
Birds
At present, the number of bird species seen in or from the garden stands at 32. The local starlings are convincing oystercatcher, mallard and buzzard impersonators, but those species have been legitimately recorded as flyovers. Obviously, our gardening efforts are aimed at the commoner woodland and scrub species that frequent gardens, rather than passing red kites and pink-footed geese, exciting though those are. The BBC offers sensible general advice on bird-specific wildlife gardening, and my bird feeding blog post discusses its merits in detail.
Given the species’ huge decline nationally, we feel privileged to have inherited a colony of house sparrows, which occupy the bushes in the garden.
I took these photos sitting on a canvas chair, covered with camouflage netting. One very wet starling left the pond and landed on my head. It grabbed a tuft of my protruding hair and pulled furiously. When this failed, it flapped hard and continued its attempt to liberate the prime nesting material. After a few minutes of frustration it went on its way.
Insects.
I have to admit to native, or at least useful, plant extremism. I’m working through a process of replacement of any purely ornamental non-native varieties with insect-friendly substitutes. This isn’t just because there cannot be too many bees and butterflies in my world, but also to load up the garden with overwintering invertebrates as natural bird food.
The hairy-footed flower bee (HFFB) is a star visitor — the top three images show a stunning sand-coloured male, and immediately above is his black female counterpart.
The following images are of solitary mining bees of the genus Andrena. The smaller individuals are males, the larger ones females. There are several species depicted, some of which can only be identified under a microscope. I’m not desperate enough for a positive identification to want to kill them.
Tim Strudwick, the Norfolk county recorder for solitary bees, believes that the black-faced males are Andrena bicolor, Gwynne’s mining bee, and the others A. scotica, the chocolate mining bee. He suggests that the females are A. helvola, the coppice mining bee, or A. fucata, the painted mining bee, most likely the former. The coppice mining bee is very sparsely recorded, but I do wonder whether that’s partly a function of a) the low number of observers (particularly relative to birders), and b) the identification challenges?
The three images above show a queen median wasp, easily confused with the worker European hornet but with a distinctive ‘Nike swoosh’ on the thorax. Is nowhere safe from mass consumerism?
I’ll add to this post as things develop and, hopefully, the number and diversity of creatures increases.
