This is a lovely time of year and I love it when nature chooses to come to my garden. It feels like a vote of confidence that I've been doing some of the right things when a bird or insect shows up on my land.
Previous blogs (here and here) have said a little about what to do in the garden but I really am not an expert so I don't have that much to say.
But I can see that I may have more opportunity to learn over the next few months and years and that's one of the things I intend to do.
And this is one of the areas where the Big Society idea really works - if we all made our gardens just a little bit better for nature then the impact could be very significant - at least up to a point. Providing food and nest sites for birds, planting the right type of plants for insects, not using pesticides (or at least being very careful about their use), favouring native plant species, leaving some areas of grass uncut and maybe even providing a water feature of some sort - all these things feel like good things to do (and would be good things for farmers to do on a larger scale too).
But, please note, it isn't the full Big Society idea because it doesn't involve Small Government as well. The government doesn't have much to say about my garden and that's how it should be. Unlike the farmland around us I do not receive payments from the taxpayer and cannot receive payments for wildlife-friendly gardening. And there is no reduction in government spending on my garden. So the Big Society bit applies to my garden but the Small Government bit does not.
Nature has encouraged me in several ways over the last week to do more for it in the garden. First there was the singing great tit I heard from the bath with an unusual song type. Rather than the usual 'tee-cher, tee-cher, tee-cher' which actually does come in a wide variety of song types such as 'zee-tee, zee-tee, zee-tee', 'zee-cher, zee-cher, zee-cher', 'cher-tee. zer-chee, zer-chee' and the occasional chiffchaff mimicer, this great tit had a song of 'schwee, too-tee, too-tee, too'. I haven't heard it for the last couple of days but I'll be listening out for it.
And then there was the coal tit singing from a tree next door which flew across our garden to our other neighbour's garden before returning, again without setting foot in our place. Coal tit is an unusual bird for our garden - occasional but unusual on the feeders.
And holly blues are flitting around the ivy, an orange tip has been reported (but I haven't seen one) and, earlier, male brimstones demonstrated why their ilk are called butterflies - so yellow they make early spring bright.
So, many of us can make a contribution to wildlife at home. We won't save the bittern, the skylark or the blue whale by doing so but we will be making a difference and knowing that we have done our bit.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
I have a farm up in the hills at over 1,500 feet and have a bird table in our ‘front garden’ – with its millions (well at least 20) gold finches and many wagtails, a couple of doves – and no magpies!
However the most interesting regular bird life around the bird table is the pheasants – one cock – two hens – and that’s with a family of stoats living in the drystone wall.
We have pheasants out front and grouse, snipe, lapwing and curlew behind.
Indeed having recently put the cows outside I still feed haylage and some hard feed (corn) and was ‘pheasantly’ surprised to find that the corn was being shared with a crow(?) and a curlew
“And there is no reduction in government spending on my garden” you say Mark – let’s all hope that you haven’t ‘maxed-out’ all of your family’s credit cards like the previous New Labour regime did with our country’s budget!
If they are maxed-out then you will have to reduce your ‘structural deficit’ immediately and budget accordingly before an outside authority imposes its will on your finances and makes your lives even more difficult. You may have to let your gardener go and do more of the maintenance work yourself or ask an uncle to pop by and lend a hand.
My advice – if this were the case - would be to be more responsible - now and in the future!