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Adrian Thomas

When we give nature a home, we all want it to be a healthy home. So, while the subject of wildlife disease isn't perhaps top of your list of pleasant reading material, as responsible gardeners it is good to know what the problems and risks are out there.
So it was good news that, yesterday, Britain's biggest public-led investigation into the health of native wildlife began - the national Garden Wildlife Health project.
It is a partnership between the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), Froglife and the RSPB, and it is calling on wildlife-loving gardeners to send in observations of wildlife suffering from disease, to build up a national picture.
Of course, that relies on us knowing something about the common symptoms to look out for, and certain garden wildlife appears more prone than others.
The two biggies in recent years have been trichomoniasis, which jumped from pigeons and doves and has been ripping into populations of Greenfinches. I thought I'd share a picture of healthy Greenfinches at a feeder in my parents' garden, but the things to watch out for are listless, fluffed up birds, unusually tame, often with bits of food stuck to their bills.
The trick is to keep your feeders clean to reduce the risk of disease transmission.
The other garden wildlife that are succumbing in unusually large numbers are Frogs and Toads, struck down by Ranavirus. Symptoms are all rather unpleasant and usually result in death, and include reddening of the skin, emaciation, listlessness and often loss of toes. The best thing to avoid is transferring spawn between ponds.
Other diseases you may come across include avian pox, causing red lumps on the faces of tits in particular, and two diseases that can cause crusty growths of the legs of Chaffinches.
The idea of the initiative is that, if you spot signs of disease, you can now report them online at gardenwildlifehealth.org, where you'll find lots more information about garden wildlife health problems.  
But I think we need a happy photo now, don't we? So how about this to cheer us up. I didn't take the photo this year, I hasten to add, but it can't be long now, given these mild conditions. Let's hope they have a disease-free year.