The Wildlife-friendly Garden. Michael Chinery
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Название: The Wildlife-friendly Garden

Автор: Michael Chinery

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Природа и животные

Серия:

isbn: 9780007588299

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ many of our garden birds as well.

      Having created habitats for the insects and birds, you will need to minimize any disturbance. So be a little less enthusiastic with the lawn mower and the hedge trimmer. Does your lawn really need to look like a bowling green, and does it matter if the hedge is a bit rough around the edges? Don’t be tempted to dead-head all of your plants; this might encourage a longer flowering season but it does deprive birds and insects of food and shelter. Bare soil needs weeding, so cover your garden with as much vegetation as you can; this will keep down the weeds and also give the birds a happy hunting ground. You might well find that wildlife-friendly gardening is gardener friendly as well!

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       Michael Chinery

      The rough grass at the base of the wall in no way detracts from the appearance of this well-managed wildlife garden.

       Keep wildlife safe

      images Household refuse Be sure to pick up any bottles and cans left in the garden after a party, or just a well-earned drink. Apart from the risk of causing injury to yourself or your family, these containers can become coffins for small animals.

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       Michael Chinery

      The great green bush-cricket is a noisy inhabitant of the many undisturbed garden hedges and shrubberies that exist both on the European continent and in southern England.

      Thousands of shrews and other small mammals die every year in carelessly abandoned bottles. Getting in to sample the dregs is easy, but climbing the smooth sides to get out again certainly is not. Drink cans are not quite so bad, but beetles and many other useful creatures regularly drown in them.

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       Michael Chinery

      Let brambles scramble over your hedge. Insects will sip nectar from the flowers in summer and the birds, and you, will be able to enjoy the fruits later in the year.

      images Fruit bushes and netting If you need to put nets over your fruit bushes, do make sure that they are taut and well anchored so that birds and other animals cannot get tangled up in them.

      images Weedkillers and pesticides If you cannot survive without using weedkillers or other pesticides, be sure to follow the instructions carefully, and to dispose of any dregs where they cannot do any harm. It is very easy to kill vegetation and its associated animal life by careless application of pesticides, especially in windy conditions when sprays can drift far from their intended targets.

       CONSERVATION TIP

      Don’t use peat in your garden. Our peat bogs have shrunk alarmingly over the last 100 years or so because of the demand for peat, and their wildlife has dwindled accordingly. Plenty of alternatives to peat are on the market now, and for hanging baskets there is ‘Supermoss’ – a sphagnum substitute made from recycled cloth and paper pulp.

      A healthy garden

      It took millions of years for nature to build up an equilibrium, in which each plant and animal species has its place and in which each helps to keep the rest under control. Nothing lives alone in nature, for every creature either eats or is eaten by one or more other creatures. We have destroyed much of this delicate balance, but it is still not too late to put the process into reverse.

       WHAT GOOD ARE MOSQUITOES?

      This question is commonly asked by many people who have been bitten by these insects. Mosquitoes don’t do us any good, of course, but, in common with all other living things, they form part of nature’s intricate web and have a role to play in nature’s economy. From the point of view of a hungry swallow or a stickleback, mosquitoes are actually quite good!

       Restoring the balance

      The key thing is to live and work with nature, steering it in the direction we want in our gardens instead of destroying it completely. If we can achieve an approximation to nature’s balance of predators and prey, then no one species will be able to multiply to such an extent that it becomes a nuisance. By creating some natural habitats in your garden you will inevitably attract their characteristic wildlife. Trees and shrubs, for example, attract birds; ponds are magnets for frogs and toads; and flower beds pull in many colourful insects. These guests will add considerable interest to your garden and will also do much to keep down the less desirable visitors – the pests. They will not eradicate the pests, but the amount of damage is likely to be minimal and you will be able to boast a healthy garden with a balanced ecology.

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       CJ Wild bird Foods/David White

      Although few of these young spiders, just hatched from their eggs, will survive to become adults, undoubtedly they will eat a lot of insects before themselves falling prey to various enemies.

       A TYPICAL GARDEN FOOD WEB

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       Michael Chinery

       CJ Wild bird Foods/David White

       Colin Varndell

      Moth feeds on nectar; spider eats moth; blackbird eats spider. This is a typical food chain. Another example might be plant; insect; vole; fox. Many more such chains can be observed in the garden, and it quickly becomes obvious that these chains are all linked together in a web – because most animals eat more than one kind of food. Blackbirds, for example, are equally happy with earthworms and elderberries, while the bank vole may vary its normally vegetarian diet with snails and fungi as well as insects. Just a few of the chains in a garden food web are illustrated here, with the arrows pointing from the food to the consumers. You will find that each chain starts with a plant. With each species kept in check by its predators and/or food supplies, the whole community remains in a healthy equilibrium.

      Garden friends and foes

      Older nature books commonly listed the gardener’s friends and foes, but now that we know a lot more about the life histories of the animals and know that everything has its place in nature’s complex web, it is not so easy to pigeonhole them in this way. For example, a centipede eating a harmful slug might be regarded as a friend, but you might change your opinion on discovering that a centipede’s diet consists mainly of other СКАЧАТЬ