Encouraging Wildlife to your Garden
Helping our Garden Visitors ….
Across lockdown I’ve got to know my furry and feathered garden inhabitants rather well. The process of training them onto the hand was certainly faster than I’d imagined. The more time we spend in our gardens, the more our wildlife will trust us. This is fantastic for the photographers out there - in my view there’s no better therapy.
Those of us who have spent years commuting into the office most days of the week will know this robs us of a sizeable chunk of our life. Whilst lockdown brought untold constraints to our lives, many of us were able to work productively from home. I’ll qualify that by saying that I don’t have a young family to educate whilst the schools are closed and I fully appreciate how exhausting it must be for so many parents juggling all of that with work as well.
For me, clawing back three hours a day of travelling time meant that I could spend those hours in my rural West Sussex garden. As any gardener will know, the work never ends. There’s always tidying to do as well as plenty of tweaking and thinking. Time passes quickly when we’re absorbed in something we enjoy. The other benefit of being in the garden isn’t just the time we spend with our plants, but the contact we might have with our local wildlife.
The rate at which wildlife is declining is quite alarming, even the species we once thought of as common. The reasons for this are many, from loss of habitat, changing agricultural practices, through to air and water pollution. We can still do our bit on an individual level to create areas in our gardens which are favourable not just to our plants but to animals as well. Planting for insects is something we should all be doing (and I’ll be writing a post in the summer on precisely that). But larger animals need help as well. This RSPB article on the decline of British birds will give you a good overview.
Birds and other mammals benefit from having areas of cover in the garden as well as access to food and fresh water. Different bird species need different types of food so educating ourselves on that will help us to buy a good variety of feeds and treats. Birds are very clean animals so birdbaths and feeding areas should be routinely scrubbed (at least once a week). This helps to prevent the transmission of infections which are more common than many of us realise. Birds suffer from parasites so regular bathing is important to them. In the hotter months I’m often topping up the birdbaths several times per day, and putting out extra containers.
I’m fortunate to have a good range of birds which visit my feeders, and occasionally some less common visitors. But on a daily basis I have the familiar faces I’ve grown to know so well over the years. These animals and birds are my ‘garden family’ and I’ve built up a productive and enjoyable relationship with most of them. Some of them are prone to digging and rearranging my plants, but I can forgive that for the pleasure and therapy animals bring.
In the summer of 2020 we had a fantastic showing of baby birds and baby squirrels. All I had to do was show my face in the garden and I would soon be surrounded by juveniles and their parents. It took a matter of minutes for the mother squirrel to feed right at my feet and as soon as she did that the babies copied. My young Blackbird fledglings were exactly the same. At the end of a gardening stint I would sit outside in my deckchair with at least half a dozen little friends within a couple of feet.
My garden birds have a feeding routine and the squirrels are quick to hoover up whatever’s left for them. If I’m even a few minutes late in the morning topping up the water and checking the feeders, my three squirrels will be on the kitchen and dining room window sill asking for attention.
These photographs have mostly been taken through the kitchen or dining room window. I work full-time and if I see one of my little chums it’s very easy to simply pick up the camera which I keep on my desk each day and aim it at my visitor. A telephoto lens is important for this kind of thing of course, and accurate autofocus given there’s a pane of glass in the way. Whilst I live with an award-winning photographer I do manage to take some of the pictures you see myself (although I confess I haven’t yet progressed to the post-production stage!). Whilst I have a small camera of my own, for specialist work I’ll borrow something.
The majority of these photographs were taken with the Panasonic GX8 (a micro 4/3 camera) with the Pana Leica 100-400 lens fitted to it. Because this is a 4/3 sensor camera, there is a x2 ‘crop factor’ which doubles the effective focal length. Because my garden animals are quite tame I’ve never had to resort to zooming very much with this lens, but it’s nice to have the extra magnification should I needed. By and large an ‘effective’ focal length of up to 400 mm would be ample for this kind of photography. On a full frame camera that would of course be a 400 mm lens, but if you have a crop sensor camera such as APS-C then a zoom range up to 250 or 300mm will give you similar effective reach.