I think being a gardener makes you more in tune with nature and let’s be honest we are! We spend time nurturing plants and soils in our own little Eden, whether it’s paid for a client or for our own pleasure. It’s not just for us or the bank manager we do this work for but also the wildlife that supports and uses this area for food, not always to our pleasure, I may add.
I suppose I did start gardening before getting very interested in wildlife, I say suppose, as I was only 4 before started gardening and not long after getting into wildlife and loved to spending time wandering around the countryside seeing what birds were flying around, the butterflies dancing in the bushes and the mammals trying to avoid our eye contact as they dart around.
Over the past few years I have started getting back into my wildlife, spending time watching them during my working day and when driving around and this has led me to start listing them, and this year I thought I would share what I see with you all. I am very lucky that I work in a very varied areas from the South Downs to the new forest and a few trips towards the sea and I cover quite a lot in a working week and I hope this will bring me a wide diversity of wildlife.
I have got little spreadsheets made up to record what I see during the year and I am going to take part in the #My200Birdyear challenge started and hosted by Bird watching magazine and it’s basically trying to see 200 different birds in a year. I am going to run my list from January as I had already written down what I have seen already. I also take part in the great bee and butterfly count and love seeing them. Adding in dragonflies and damsels for this time as its a group of insects I would love to learn more about and this would be a great chance
So anywhere here’s where I am at in the 4 areas at the moment.
My bird list
- Redwing
- Pheasant
- Jackdaw
- Wigeon
- Mistle thrush
- French partridge
- Raven
- Common teal
- Song thrush
- English partridge
- Heron
- Shoveler
- Field fare
- Wood pigeon
- Little egret
- Gadwell
- Blackbird
- Collard dove
- Large egret
- Robin
- Wren
- Kingfisher
- Blue tit
- Mallard duck
- Moorhen
- Great tit
- Lapwings
- Coot
- Long tailed tit
- Grey wagtail
- Canada goose
- Coal tit
- Pied wagtail
- Kesteral
- Gold crest
- Mute swan
- Red kite
- Chaffinch
- Cormorant
- Buzzard
- Bull finch
- Green parakeets
- Sparrowhawk
- Green finch
- Skylark
- Peregrine falcon
- Gold finch
- Great backed gull
- House sparrow
- Starling
- Jay
- Dunnock
- Black headed gull
- Tufted duck
- Tree creeper
- Herring gull
- Great crested grebe
- Nuthatch
- Magpie
- Ostercatcher
- Green woodpecker
- Rook
- Common poachard
- Great spotted woodpecker
Bee
- Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum)
- Red tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidaries)
Butterly
- Red Admiral
- Brimstone
So if you feel inspired, I would love you to join in and see what you can see as well
Yes, it does put in contact with nature, and I happen to work a lot with the natural landscape, but landscaping is very unnatural. We work with plants imported from all over the world in such a way that they tamper with the natural ecosystem instead of harmonize with it. People who do not work with it do not realize how unnatural it is.
I agree to a point Tony, our environment unless you are up a mountain, is shaped so much by us humans and the landscape in the uk has been altered from many thousands of years of human interference, from farming, grazing to the introduction of alien sp, something that’s happened since humans have up sticks and moved around, we just do it in a bigger form now don’t we
I happen to live up a mountain, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and even there, where natives grow wild, and the few exotics are small annual weeds that do not get noticed, huge stumps remain from redwoods that were harvested a century ago.