Well seeing as everyone is ‘confined to barracks’ so to speak, I thought I’d do a post on our garden and the wildlife we have attracted since moving in.
Hopefully I will do a few more posts over the coming weeks as the season changes.
We live on the south side of Beverley and thankfully when they built the estate they did leave a good amount of greenery and the footpaths nearby provide decent wildlife corridors.
When we moved in the garden had a slate border, brass in the middle and 3 or 4 ornamental trees, it was pretty much a desert.
Slowly but surely we have made little improvements to the habitat and eventually we have seen some good results.
The slate border has been replaced with a mixture of wildflowers and shrubs.
We have built a pond.
We have created 3 logpiles.
We have put up 3 nest boxes.
Last year we let the grass grow tall in the middle of the lawn.
We have placed a few feeders with different food around the garden.
So what have we had?
Starting with mammals;
We had our first hedgehog about 3 years agon and last uear they built a nest! They have recently become active again and can be seen regularly on our trail camera.
The other pretty cool critters we see quite often are wood mice and they come out either late evening, during the night or early morning. They were quite active over the summer and it is likely they were taking food for their young.
We have had house mice, grey squirrel and also we get a couple of bats flitting over the garden on warm summer evenings.
Birdwise we have had the following actually in the garden
House sparrow
Tree sparrow
Dunnock
Blue tit
Great tit
Coal tit
Long Tailed Tit
Chaffinch
Greenfinch
Starling
Blackbird
Song Thrush
Fieldfare
Robin
Wren
Carrion crow
Rook
Jackdaw
Magpie
Woodpigeon
Collared Dove
Blackcap
Herring gull
Common gull
Lesser black-backed gull
Black headed gull
Sparrowhawk
Housemartin (nesting under the eaves)
Birds seen flying over include;
Common buzzard
Peregrine falcon
Red Kite
Kestrel
Greylag goose
Pink footed goose
Cormorant
Mallard
Teal
Pied wagtail
Yellow wagtail
Meadow pipit
Bullfinch
Birds heard include:
Tawny Owl
Chiff-chaff
Great Spotted Woodpecker
Skylark
Pheasant
We haven’t done too bad for butterflies either-16 species so far as well as 5 hummingbird hawk moths!
There has also been a myriad of creepy crawlies, bees, flies and spiders(none of which are my speciality)
There have already been some great sightings so far this year-nesting robins, hedgehos(s), wood mice,tadpoles in the pond and a flyover red kite.
I hope to do a few more posts over the coming weeks and as the season goes on hopefully there should be more things to enjoy.
Its testing times at the moment, but it has certainly given me some time to reflect on things to be thankful for. Exploring the natural world can be good for the soul and it is literally on your doorstep.
Stay safe, thanks for reading.