This dry spring has me anxious about the lives of wild things who live beyond my garden. I post pleas on local Facebook groups for people to leave out water but it doesn’t seem enough. I have a hedgehog making a dandelion-leaf nest in my garden, but how are those in other gardens faring? And how are the foxes and the tadpoles and the birds and the worms? What is everyone doing for their wild neighbours?
How does a wildlife gardener connect with the community and help to create networks and corridors that link gardens together and to the wider landscape? How do we spread the word about species decline and habitat loss, about the amazing role gardens can have in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate change? How can we change public perceptions of what constitutes a well-maintained garden and what is considered mess? How can we help species through a drought?
Hedgehogs.
Everyone loves hedgehogs. Everyone says ‘Wow’ and ‘Cor’ and all the things you would expect from people being truly delighted by another species. Hedgehogs have a lot going for them: they’re nocturnal so have an element of mystery and surprise; they have spikes, which makes them unusual; they can roll into a ball, which is basically a superpower, and they tend not to run away when they come across a human or predator, which means you can have a good look at them. They have suffered staggering declines (estimated to be around 95 per cent since the 1950s), which makes them precious. And they suffer enormously in a drought, which means we can actively help them now. To garden for hedgehogs is to garden for everyone else: they need access to the space itself as well as water and invertebrate food, and somewhere to nest or hibernate. We therefore need to open our gardens up to them, leave dishes of water or dig ponds they can enter and exit easily, grow food plants for the caterpillars and beetles that hedgehogs eat and leave wild areas where they can take shelter. If you garden specifically for hedgehogs you’ll have a pretty good garden for lots of other species, too.
My garden alone is not enough for a neighbourhood’s-worth of hedgehogs, and so the only way I can meaningfully help those living in my area is to reach out to the community, to engage with more people to do more for wildlife. Connecting with those who already are helping wildlife is also useful – it’s good to know my allies. So I decide to set up a hedgehog group.
I email Mike, who helps run the local park group, and ask if I can borrow the park’s name to create a Facebook group for the hogs of the park and surrounding streets. He says yes but why don’t you launch it with a talk? I laugh and say of course I can launch my hedgehog group with a talk. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve written it.’
I set up the Facebook group first. It doesn’t have much, just a what/why/where of hedgehogs in the neighbourhood, a link to the Hedgehog Street website (a joint collaboration between the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species that has seen neighbourhoods get together to create more hedgehog-friendly gardens) and bits of information on what to do if you find a hog out during the day. I invite a few people to join but not many will know about the group until I’ve done my talk. Mike was right.
I spend two days finding screenshots of hedgehogs feeding, foraging and courting in my garden, and put them together to make a PowerPoint presentation. I write a script and practise it in my head as I walk to the gym and the shops, take Tos out. I worry about the audience: will they be gardeners or not? Young or old? What if it’s full of kids? I remove slides of hogs stuck in netting or with bonfire and strimming injuries, just in case, and replace them with cute pics of hedgehogs with hoglets. The aim: cheerful and easy ways to help a declining species. Not too much about habitat loss or the climate crisis. No big lectures on plastic grass and paving (although I will mention them). Just nice things about hogs and easy ways to make their lives easier, especially in a drought. I hope it will cover all bases and not put anyone off, but also that it will be the start of a wildlife-loving community that will do more for the hedgehogs and other species living in these streets.
I tell Mike it’s ready and we arrange for the talk to be held in the scout hut on a chilly Wednesday evening. Someone from the park group makes a flyer and I print it out and leaflet-drop 250 houses in the surrounding streets. Mike makes a Facebook event page and invites people from local groups. In the end it’s all very last minute and I worry we’ve left it too late for people to know about it and come. Mike, too, thinks people won’t make it. I arrive to the scout hut to find he’s put out 10 chairs.
‘Are you not expecting many people to come?’ I ask, laughing to hide my anxiety.
‘Well, I don’t like putting too many out,’ he says.
I count in my head everyone who’s told me they’re coming. ‘I’ll add another row,’ I say, hopefully. But, in the end, I have to add four rows as people keep coming through the door (about 40, I think).
I am nervous, as I always am before I do a talk, no matter how often I do them. But I get it out: the what, the why, the how. There’s a good, mixed audience: tiny children who wave plastic dinosaurs at me and a handful of eight- to twelve-year-olds. But it’s mostly adults. Parents of the children plus a good number who are there for the hogs. For the next couple of days more people join my Facebook group, taking the number to 54. I’m not going to save the world with my little hedgehog group but I might help make life easier for this population of hogs, which will have a positive influence on other species.
The Facebook group helps me connect with others who also feed and care for hedgehogs and I enjoy seeing their videos of healthy hogs tucking into cat food left out by kind people. I use the group to post my own videos, along with reminders to leave out water as conditions remain so dry. I hope we are making life a bit easier for them.
I also use the group to welcome new hogs to the neighbourhood, which occasionally come to my garden via my local rescue centres. Usually they are released back where they were found but sometimes they can’t be – they might have been found in a garden with plastic grass or paving (so no food or shelter for them), they might have been found on or near a main road, where they’re likely to be squished, or in an area with a high density of badgers, who have a tendency to eat them. Sometimes, sadly, people don’t want hedgehogs back in their gardens. They don’t want the ‘hassle’ of picking up hedgehog droppings or having to deal with their dog troubling them. They think hedgehogs should just go and live somewhere else. I don’t know where ‘else’ is. Victims of habitat loss, agricultural intensification, pesticides and garden fences, which stop them roaming the 2km a night they need to find food, hedgehogs need our gardens more than ever. We should be doing everything but turning them away.
My first hedgehog rescue of the year is an autumn orphan. He was found in a garden as a tiny wee thing last November, being played with by a fox. He might have left the nest too early, gone for a wander and been caught out, or his mother might have abandoned the nest or been run over or picked up by someone well-meaning or otherwise, while out foraging for food. He was lucky, taken in by a woman who perhaps cared too much; she fed him up and continued feeding him through winter so he didn’t hibernate, and then refused to let him be released into a garden where there might be foxes. Inevitably, she hasn’t found anywhere that meets this brief and so it’s April and this young male, who hasn’t been outside since he was found on his first trip out of the nest four months ago, is desperate to be set free.
Foxes and hedgehogs generally get along, but young foxes can be curious and can hurt small hogs if they ‘play’ with them too vigorously. Foxes visit my garden and every time I catch them and hedgehogs together on the trail camera they are ignoring each other; the foxes don’t even bother to sniff them. But I can imagine that a playful young fox, with all the excitement of youth, would be a headache for a young hedgehog. Hedgehogs sometimes wind up in rescue centres with bites to their back legs, which may come from young foxes or dogs. These wounds can attract flies, which lay eggs in them and lead to horrible maggoty infestations. So, yes, a young hog should be wary and perhaps even kept away from curious foxes, but for a healthy adult hog with a coat full of spines? A fox would be no trouble at all.
The message from the rescue centre reads, ‘Can you take a young male hog? He weighs 1.4kg!’
Have I ever known such a large hog? The average weight for an adult is between 500g and 1kg. I have weighed hogs that came close to 1kg, but another 400g on top of that is a lot. A fox would be no match for this chunk.
‘Can he roll into a ball?’ I ask Pete, who runs the rescue centre with his wife, Gayle, when I pick the hedgehog up.
‘Only just,’ he replies.
He’d been fed a diet of mealworms, which are protein-rich but terrible for hedgehogs as they contain a lot of potassium. This, for reasons I don’t fully understand, reduces the amount of calcium in their bones and can lead to ‘metabolic bone disease’, which causes horrible, painful fractures and often means they have to be put down. Pete keeps him in for observation for a night to make sure he is walking properly, and declares him fit. Phew! He just needs a bit of exercise, some wild ways, and an absence of mealworms. Done.
I take my new lump home and release him into the garden. It’s evening, around 7.00 p.m., and the light is already fading. I have no spare boxes to introduce him to – it’s a busy time of year for hedgehogs and they’re full – and so I pop him at the well-used entrance to the habitat pile, and he buries himself inside. I head into the house and shut the kitchen door, and then stand at the window for a few minutes, watching to see if he will come out. There’s always a pang of love for these autumn orphans, most of whom are rescued as soon as they leave the nest and have never really known the big wide world. How must he be feeling right now?
The garden is, essentially, a larger, wilder version of what he has been used to since he was found. There are no mealworms but there is a dish of kitten biscuits that I top up each evening, as well as dishes of water and a big pond to drink from (I leave out an extra dish of water in case he is too timid to travel far for a drink). There are boxes and a large open habitat pile to sleep in. There’s also another box and another dish of kitten biscuits at my neighbour Kate’s, two doors down, and then a dish of meaty wet food at Linda’s, who lives next door to Kate and ‘feeds the cats’. He has everything he needs, plus me at the kitchen window with binoculars, and at the computer watching hedgehog videos, monitoring him.
He comes out of his hiding hole within 10 minutes and sniffs his new surroundings. He finds the hedgehog feeding station straight away, and I’m pleased to see he can get in it (I was worried he wouldn’t be able to), although it’s a tight squeeze and he manages to move the box as he struggles inside.
‘Christ,’ says Emma. ‘We should call him Doughnut!’
I’m pretty sure he spends the first few days in the garden. He claims one of the boxes as his own, which he leaves at dusk each evening to visit the feeding station for biscuits. He’s easy to spot: ‘Doughnut’s on the patio, he’s still massive!’ says Emma, as she lets Tos out for a wee, ‘Bloody hell, there’s Doughnut again,’ says Emma, as she fills up the feeding station, ‘Doughnut’s just scared the bejesus out of Tosca.’ Who needs hedgehog videos when you have commentary like this?
He will lose weight gradually. There’s a whole garden to walk around and neighbourhood to explore. He will find other places to sleep as he becomes more confident. A young male, he will also be raging with hormones, which will take him beyond the garden in search of females. I post about his arrival in my hedgehog group:
‘Look out for a hog the size of a bus!’
Dark-edged bee-fly, Bombylius major
The dark-edged bee-fly is the most common of 10 species of bee-fly in the UK. Gingery and furry, with one pair of dark-edged wings, it looks like a bumblebee but flies with a hover and a high-pitched buzz, jutting out its enormous proboscis, or tongue, which it uses to drink nectar from spring flowers. It’s a little furry narwhal.
It’s one of the spring friends I look for as the season turns. I won’t rest until I’ve seen one. It’s a happy day when I see my first dark-edged bee-fly of the year. Nearly always, the sun is shining and the first of the primroses and forget-me-nots are in bloom. I hear its high-pitched buzz first, then there it is. ‘Bee-fly!’ I tell anyone who will listen.
A parasitoid of mining bees, the female ‘flicks’ eggs into or near nest burrows after mating and her larvae, using false legs, enter them and eat the store of pollen and nectar intended for the bee grubs. They then metamorphose into a different type of grub – a process called hyper-metamorphosis, which is rare in the insect world – and they eat the bee grubs themselves. They emerge a year later as gorgeous adult bee-flies, and hover about singing their spring song, much to the delight of gardeners.
To garden for bee-flies is to garden for mining bees – have an area of short lawn or exposed soil, plus plenty of spring flowers. Don’t be sad about mining bees being parasitised by grubs with pretend legs – nature has evolved the most fascinating ways of getting by; we should celebrate all of it.
May
Despite the lack of rain, the garden has put on growth. Not quite lush but green, full-looking after a winter and early spring of being subdued and locked away. Growth is slower than it would have been if it was wetter but I’ll take it. I’ll take any growth, any green over grey, any new flowers. There are fresh green leaves, unfurling fern fronds, the first blooms of white comfrey, guelder rose, rowan and honesty. Next door’s wisteria is coming into flower, too. ‘Hello!’ I say, ‘hello, hello, hello!’
The sparrows and starlings have had their first brood. I can tell because there’s an urgency with which they come to the garden – they have hungry mouths to feed. They descend all at once in a big mixed flock and then ransack the garden before rushing off again. They’ll visit bird feeders as adults but will always need natural food for their young, and so my garden, with its meadow and its native plants and its pond and its gardener, is perfect for them. They hop around the outer edge of the pond where I’ve left a buffer of wildflower meadow for insects to take shelter, they climb into the teenaged ivy and peck at tiny grubs behind the leaves. The sparrows home in on leaf tips and stems for aphids, while starlings charge around, taking snails and larger prey with determined hops. I stand at the kitchen window and watch them, laughing at how busy and serious they are, compared to the rest of the year, when they are idiots.
One of the house sparrows is still being an idiot. He’s decided to start a nest in one of my swift boxes. He’s obviously got one elsewhere, with chicks in it, but instead of finding food for them, like the rest of his clan, he’s trying to persuade them to move house. He sits in his swift hole and cheeps at them while they forage for food and they, understandably, ignore him. I’ll give him a 10 for effort, for persistently trying to persuade them that my garden is the place to be, when clearly there’s some resistance.
He’s very welcome to the swift box, as the swifts have ignored it for three years. I’ve been watching him bring nesting material in, collecting grasses and sticks and other bits and pieces to build his (probably quite bad) nest. I’ve watched him fly in and out, to and from various posts like the shed and the hawthorn, the top of the roof, sticking his head out and cheeping like the lord of the manor. I wonder how many other half-built nests have been made in the other nest boxes on the house – the other three swift boxes and the three sparrow boxes, one of which, once, was used by great tits. If the sparrows moved in and nested in a loose colony as they are prone to do, then they could use all four of the swift boxes and all three of the sparrows’. Then there’s the hole in the gable at the top of the house – eight nests. This rogue, idiot male, who’s calling to his clan while they busy themselves with mouths to feed, is trying to sell them eight new homes they can move into, now, with a fully stocked garden of invertebrates on the doorstep. He’s a pioneer, not an idiot. He’s a leader. He has vision! They’re still ignoring him. But he may have success, one day. Imagine living among a clan of eight house-sparrow families. Surrounded by cheeping idiots – I would be so happy.
The first swift of the year is marked with exclamation marks and stars, with hugging strangers in the street, with giant, beaming grins. I count down the days to it, starting in mid-April, and trip over myself for nearly three weeks, walking around with my head in the sky. I’ll meet you in the pub and make you sit outside so I can watch for the telltale effortless flap of swift wings, so I might hear the hint of a scream.
‘Swift!’ I will say, to anyone and everyone. ‘Swiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifffffftttttttttt!’ I’m really, genuinely very sorry if you’re midway through talking about your divorce.
I love swifts with all my heart, with every ounce of my being. I have three swift boxes that were retro-fitted into the cavity walls of my house at the back, and a big white one at the front in case they need a bigger welcome sign. For three years I played swift calls from my bathroom window, which is said to lure them to potential new nest sites, but then a neighbour told me they were driving her mad so I had to stop. Still, swifts might find me eventually. I live in hope that, one day, my house will be full of swifts (I haven’t told my neighbour this).
Like many summer migrants, swifts fly here from the Congo Basin each spring, breed and then fly back again. And, like many other summer migrants, they’re declining at a terrifying rate – thought to be around 60 per cent in the last 20 years, but likely much, much more since the turn of the last century. They nest in holes in roofs in tall buildings and houses, which makes them vulnerable to home ‘improvements’ like insulation, new soffits or fascias, a new roof or loft conversion. These can easily be compensated for by people putting swift boxes on their homes, by councils and building developers making swift bricks compulsory, but there are no plans to do such a thing, despite petitions and pleas from nature lovers. Then there’s the decline of insects, which is harder to reverse on small scales. Swifts catch insects high up in the sky and collect them in a ball in their throat, called a bolus, which they take back to their nests to feed their young. With fewer insects there’s less to go around and it looks like fewer swifts are nesting successfully. Again, we can all contribute to them doing better by growing more plants that insects feed and breed on, by reducing hard surfaces and plastic, on which very little can live. Of course, most people don’t bother, and so swifts continue to decline.
That swifts are declining makes them even more special, but it makes the pleasure-pain of seeing them all the more intense. There are fewer of them this year. There are fewer of them this year.
Apart from those few short weeks in which they’re laying eggs and raising young, swifts are completely airborne – they eat, sleep and mate on the wing. They’re so good at being in the sky that they’re terrible at being on land, their wings too long and their legs too short to take off again. If they become ‘grounded’ they need a kind human to pick them up and help them back to the sky, often by climbing a ladder or going to the first floor of a building and holding them out on a palm-stretched hand until they’re ready to take off again. Never throw a swift into the sky but wait, calmly, for it to launch itself.
Unlike cuckoos, which I also love, and nightingales and swallows and many other summer migrants that return to our shores from Africa each spring, swifts do not make for a romantic first sighting. Living in the city, if I want to see cuckoos and nightingales I have to travel to more rural landscapes. I will hear a cuckoo while tramping through cobweb-strewn pastures, hear nightingales while sitting beneath an 800-year-old oak tree. Last year, I saw my first swift flying over a bin lorry on the New Church Road. I’m not knocking it, the first swift sighting of the year remains a highlight; it’s just that, sometimes, on bin day I’m reminded of them, which is a very odd thing indeed.
The bin lorry swifts are part of a colony that lives on the other side of the main road, about a five-minute walk from my house. There’s a small group of swift lovers living among them, who celebrate them and have erected nest boxes. But most people don’t know or care who lives in their roof spaces and would probably prefer that they didn’t.
