Your wildlife month
Our gardens should be a riot of chirping and buzzing, of ponds full of tadpoles, of rutting hedgehogs, of bursting buds and the freshest green leaves. Fill your ears with birdsong and your eyes with the first of the year’s treasures: bees, bee-flies, blossom and butterflies.
April should be a month of showers that nourish seedlings, plants and the species that eat them without washing them away, that keeps the soil moist but not sodden. If it’s dry, keep your garden hydrated – ideally with rainwater from your water butt. This will help ensure there are worms and caterpillars for birds to feed their chicks and for hedgehogs to fatten up before mating, that there will be mud for house martins to build their nests – that spring can SPRING. As gardeners, we are stewards of our little patches of land, so let’s look after them.
You may spot...
Ashy mining bee,
Andrena cineraria
The ashy mining bee is a solitary, ground-nesting bee, roughly the size of a honeybee. Females are blue-black with two ash-grey hair bands on the thorax, and white hairs on the face. Males are smaller, with more grey hairs across their thorax, face and abdomen, and longer antennae.
Flying from March to June, they feed on a variety of flowers such as willow, blackthorn and dandelions, and are an important pollinator of oilseed rape. After mating, the females burrow into bare ground or ground with short vegetation.
Despite being solitary, they often nest alongside other females in large aggregations. Their burrowing activity creates volcano-like mounds around the nests. Each nest has several cells, into which the female lays one egg on a ‘cake’ of pollen and nectar. The eggs hatch into grubs, which eat the cake, then pupate and emerge as adults the following spring.
Also look out for…
◾ Orange-tip butterflies flying near cuckoo flower and bluebells.
◾ Chiffchaffs in gardens before heading to rural areas to breed.
◾ Smooth newts, which breed from April to June. Sit quietly by your pond and you may spot a male ‘wafting’ pheromones at a female to try to persuade her to mate with him.
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Flying from March to June, they feed on a variety of flowers such as willow, blackthorn and dandelions