Modern gardens, decking and patios, bad for wildlife and birds
16/02/2007 00:00:00
How to create a wildlife garden
The RSPB’s five-point plan for gardeners:
- Plant a native shrub or climber such as honeysuckle, rose or ivy. These will not only look great in your garden but take up little space and will provide food and shelter for birds and other wildlife
- Leave patches of long grass. This will provide a home for insects eaten by house sparrows and other birds
- Leave cutting back old stems of your herbaceous plants and annuals until the Spring. Not only will you be providing shelter for insects, the birds will also eat the seeds
- Ensure a supply of fresh water every day in a shallow dish, small water feature or if you have room build a pond! This will attract insects and aquatic plant seeds that birds can feed on, as well as giving them somewhere to drink and bathe
- Supplement natural food sources all year round with feeders and bird tables filled with nuts, seeds and household scraps. This will provide birds with alternative food if insects and plant seeds are hard to find.
Editor's note, a double whammy.
- Decking, gravel and paving is bad for wildlife as it makes a 'desert' of the garden. However it also ravages the land that the stone, wood and gravel are taken from, ruining those habitats as surely as the garden that are paved over.
Numbers of song thrushes, house sparrows and starlings have all plummeted over the last 30 years, and the RSPB fears the way many gardens are managed has made matters worse.
Trends for low maintenance, concrete, gravel and paved gardens may limit the availability of insects that birds need to feed their young. Recent studies have shown that a lack of insects to feed house sparrow nestlings is reducing survival rates.
In urban areas, where bird declines have been most dramatic, paving over front gardens to provide extra parking is becoming increasingly common. Front gardens covering an area roughly 22 times the size of Hyde Park have been paved over in London. The situation is even more dramatic across the UK with more than 1 in 5 urban front gardens mostly paved in England and Scotland.
A surge in sales of decking witnessed over the last five years may also be a factor in the declines of insects and consequently fledgling deaths.
The RSPB is using its annual Feed the Birds Day as a launch-pad for a UK wide drive to save the wildlife that shares our gardens.
Richard Bashford, the RSPB’s Feed the Birds Day project manager, said: ‘We are losing more and more of the natural environment around our homes, particularly our front gardens. Therefore it’s even more important that we help the birds by making whatever space we do have as wildlife-friendly as possible.
‘Research has shown that even tiny front gardens or green verges are vital for urban wildlife, housing up to 786 different species of insect. We urge people to follow our 5-point plan and help wildlife now and in the future.’ Richard added: ‘The RSPB is still investigating the causes of declines and why bird populations aren’t recovering, currently there is no single factor this can be attributed to. However supplementing natural food with seeds and nuts and planting natural food sources for next Spring can only help.’
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