Ingham’s W RLD
WILDLIFE is no respecter of feelings. It has no concept of who its friends are. It will bite the hand that feeds it without a moment’s remorse. I put in enormous efforts to help the birds, butterflies and animals around our home which sits – just – in the countryside. I feed the birds every day at vast expense and our pond offers a watering hole for any passing foxes, badgers and deer. I garden with as few chemicals as possible – even the slug pellets are organic – to help the song thrushes.
To accommodate the bees and butterflies I’ve planted a wide range of flowers so nectar is available most of the year. Michaelmas daisies are keeping them fed at the moment.
At work I even write about the blighters, singing their praises and highlighting ways to help them.
And my reward? The other day a bird pooed on me – from a very great height. It was such a good dive-bomber that a Stuka pilot would have been proud.
Meanwhile, my lawn has lots of holes in it. That’s the badgers saying thank you. What is left of the grass isn’t enough for the rabbits. They like to announce their presence by eating the tulips.
As for the squirrels, I try not to feed them. I’ve got squirrel-proof feeders except no one bothered to tell the squirrels.
When they’ve finished eating the bird food, they like to dig up the bulbs in my flowerbeds.
The foxes take great delight in fertilising the garden, with the liquid after-effects of autumn berries a particularly popular tribute at the moment.
Then this week came the final, very hurtful insult. My mum died earlier this year and today we are going to inter her ashes. Instead of buying short-lived bouquets I got a large bowl of beautiful cyclamen, which should bloom for weeks by her grave, their pinks and cerises a bit of brightness in the gloom. They were on my doorstep awaiting our trip to the cemetery.
Well, yesterday my wife sent me a text: “The deer have eaten your Mum’s cyclamen. I’m getting a shotgun!”
I was furious. “The little ******* s,” I fumed, “Bambi never did this.”
Then I paused. Mum loved wildlife, particularly foxes. It was she who got me interested in birds when I was five years old. She fed a tame house sparrow called Billy who used to come to our kitchen for scraps.
She would have loved the idea of her flowers feeding the deer. She wouldn’t have minded at all.
In fact, as Brits always like to say about the dear departed, it’s what she would have wanted. And I can always get another cyclamen. CLIMATE change offers doom for some birds and hope for others. Of 124 species analysed by the British Trust for Ornithology 55 are likely to benefit, but 11 mainly northern or moorland birds will be at heightened risk of extinction.
The study in Climatic Change says 10 of the 11 victims are already in serious trouble – among them curlew, grey partridge, ring ouzel, pied flycatcher, red grouse and snipe. The vast majority of those that will benefit from global warming are already thriving.
However, a warmer Britain is also likely to be colonised by species from the continent such as serin, a sort of southern greenfinch, Bonelli’s and melodious warblers and short-toed treecreeper.
The trick will be to protect the rare and welcome the new. GREEN TIP: Watch out for deer on the roads. Autumn’s rutting season is the peak time for collisions. CITRUS fruit may offer an alternative to malaria pills. A team from Alexandria University in Egypt found that essential oils from citrus peel is “highly effective” against mozzie larvae and the pesky whining adults, reports Natural Product Research. So a nature photographer I know who swears by citrus oil as a mozzie deterrent may be right. THE Billy Bunter of goldfinches visited my garden this week, nearly twice as big as another eating the nyjer seed. But he may not have been a victim of Britain’s obesity epidemic. He may have been ill and fluffing up his feathers to keep warm, says the BTO. We’re going to keep an eye out for him.