My back garden is south facing, backs onto a field with a large lake and is surrounded by a 6ft high brick wall covered from top to bottom in ivy. It also has a large pond and many bushes that are supposed to attract bees and butterflies etc. Despite all this we hardly ever see any wildlife in the garden other than slugs and snails.
My wife is recovering quite well from a stroke and likes to sit near the window when watching the TV. My son suggested bringing in a Bird table to attract a few birds to the place. He bought us one of those wooden tables with a roof on it to keep the food dry.
We put it at the back of the garden and littered it with nuts and other things that birds are supposed to like. Within days we had dozens of birds flying in and it was a joy to watch. Sue (my wife) spent ages just watching them.
We have a pergola that runs the full length of the house so we popped down to Burford Garden Centre (which is a brilliant place) and bought 4 hanging squirrel proof bird feeders and hanged them up on the pergola the next day. The end result is that the garden is now full of birds and the squirrels have taken over the garden. We must see at least 6 different ones every day running everywhere and we are forever topping up the bird table because they have taken it over. The squirrels are forever running over the pergola and are only about 5ft away from the window, so Sue gets a close up view of them.
So if you want more wildlife in your garden, invest in a few birdfeeders. We are about to pop out again to buy some more.
Lovely.
I recently put a table type feeder and a hanging feeder in the shrubbery just outside our kitchen window, theres a lovely diversity of birds that visit, Sparrows, Wrens, Tits and Dunnocks, but we also have brave Wood Pigeons, they take ages to get up the courage to visit the table, but once there can wipe it clean very quickly! Its great to see and they are very close, maybe 3-4 ft away from the window.
Cheers..
Jase
One of the joys of lockdown for me has been watching the wildlife in our small London garden
We have always had bird feeders out and they get visited everyday
We have a pair of magpies that visit several times a day, they are incredibly intelligent birds quite capable of solving problems. There is also a very large crow that is almost tame, you can get very close to him
The various blue and great tits, robins and wood pigeons are cool to watch as well.
We had a pair of young kits squabbling the other day. Making a terrible racket.
It beats looking at the laptop whilst working.
Get a bird feeder that holds nigella seeds - it will need tiny slits in the side as the seeds are, well, tiny so too small for a standard feeder - you'll have a damn good chance of attracting goldfinches
Robins love mealworms
We seem to get a lot of birds in the garden (pigeons, thrushes, jays, robins), but are unable to have any bird feeders.
There's a compatibility issue with squirrels, a jack russell behind glazing and frequent teams calls.
I've made a couple of insect 'hotels' hoping to entice a few solitary bees.
We didn’t have much success with our bird feeder until we switched from seed mix to sunflower seed hearts. The birds love that, and will empty the feeder in a week.
In previous years we have had blue tits nesting in a bird box, but nothing this year. I suspect mice have taken it over, as I evicted them when I cleaned out the box in February. No doubt they have come back. Our fence in overgrown with ivy, and the birds love to nest in its depths. It was blackbirds last year, and robins this.
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