Unsupervised gardening

Another action packed weekend in the garden but this time without the guidance of my little friendly robins to keep a watchful eye!  Is it safe to leave a child unsupervised in the garden, handling dangerous tools? However will I cope? I thought I managed remarkably well under the circumstance.

Having taken delivery of my drought tolerant plants, I set about positioning and planting them. All that is required now is to get a ton of sandstone rejects from the local quarry and a few bags of large bark chips to mulch the area and it’ll be finished. With the rock roses, cotton lavender, lavender, mallow, geraniums, escallonia, hebe’s, artemesia and a whole host more, I can look forward a palette of colour, hordes of insects and foraging common lizard this summer Thinking ahead to those warm summer days and evenings reminds me those masters of the sky, the swift, will soon be back with us from the end of May.

Last year, the publication of Birds of Conservation Concern highlighted a sharp decline in their population, which saw them move from ‘Green’ to ‘Amber’ listed. This means a decline of between 25% and 49% in the last 25 years. At 45% decline, the bird came very close to becoming Red listed.

The cause of decline is not clear, but loss of nest sites could be a significant factor. Last summer the RSPB asked the public for help to tell us where they saw birds flying about at roof level ‘screaming’ or entering nests in buildings. I’m currently involved with work to continue this in the summer when the birds return, so watch this space. The inventory will help planners in their decision making to protect threatened sites and to better target provision of new sites in development.

In the meantime, you can still submit records for last summer, if you remember where you saw birds around or entering buildings. If you can actually see the structure of the nest it is not a swift but probably house martin or swallow. Swifts are all dark birds with long, narrow cycle-shaped wings and no obvious forked tail, as in the superb picture above, taken by Steve Blain. Records need to be given as Ordnance survey grid reference or at least to Post Code level.