Resident Woodpecker

We now definitely have a resident Great Spotted Woodpecker in the garden - he turned up soon after we put in the suet log (though doesn't feed on it!) and has been back pretty much every day since. Mainly he likes the peanuts in the mesh feeder.

I also went down the garden and found a starling having a paddle - he seemed totally unconcerned by my turning up!

Pond - December 2008

Here's the new pond - ignore the garden lights arranged like sentries as they're just there to prevent people walking on the particularly grotty edge of the turf. They won't be there in the end, though there will probably be some form of lights.

The "border" next to it is all going to come out and be replaced with more wildlife-friendly plants. The evergreen honeysuckle will stay I think, but I'm going to cut it back hard to give the new planting a fair chance.

Welcome to my new blog

Hi

I've decided to start a second blog (in addition to my Tai Chi one) about the wildlife in my garden.

I garden mainly for wildlife, I'm not really that interested in the whole garden design thing, so with any luck I should have stuff about which to post.

• We do bird feeding in a big way with about 5 feeders and a bird table on the go. We had our first bird-feeder woodpecker today
  
• I've just put in a large pond, to supplement our existing small pond which even though it was only about a metre across has frogs, newts and toads. Oh, and three dragonflies emerged from it last year
  
• We have hedgehogs - yea!
• We have bats which feed over the garden. I'm chair of our county bat group so this is a real bonus - yea!

So I hope to post regularly about the wildlife stories from my garden.

But first, shameless plug, if you're interested in Wildlife Gardening you have to buy a copy of How To Make a Wildlife Garden by Chris Baines. He's my hero!