Winter Garden Birds
Thank you to those who submitted observations from last winter. A summary of the observations is attached at the end of this article. Earlier reports are available upon request. Also, a nice picture below of a male blackcap from Jane.
Secret Gardens
Your annual opportunity to nose around other people’s gardens will come soon (June 15/16). Go to www.bloomingbedminster.org.uk for more details.
Wildlife Gardening at the Right Angle
I believe that BCC has now stopped squirting doubtful chemicals at considerable financial cost at the junction between front garden walls and the pavement. Good!!
This leaves people with three choices:
1. clear the junction manually which could take up to 5 minutes a month.
2. do nothing and see what plants appear. There’s lots of that happening already.
3. manage the junction by encouraging flowering plants such as forget-me-not, ivy-leaved toadflax and small daisies. These can be rooted in the many cracks that mark the joint between pavement and wall. Neighbours could get together on this as part of a My Wild Street collaboration or just do it.
A six inch strip of small plants 100 yards long gives nearly 17 square yards of planting. More than some front gardens! How many hundreds of yards of streets are there in BS3? Insects will love it and I can’t see that it would be a trip hazard or damage either the wall or pavement.
Getting to Know You
We now have 115 people on our contact list. In January it was 79, so that’s a healthy increase. We are not a meetingy kind of group. Most of our activities are undertaken alone or in small groups as we look for butterflies, monitor birds and cultivate our gardens and allotments, but it would still be good to add faces to names. I’m proposing therefore that we have ‘drop ins’ on Saturday and Sunday mornings. What this means in practice is that most Saturday and Sunday mornings I drink coffee and read The Observer either in the Tobacco Factory or outside the deli on North Street, depending on the weather. If you are free at that time and you fancy a chat, I don’t mind being interrupted. If a few people come, so much the better. But, I said ‘most’, so email me if you are coming in case I’m not going to be there. [ MyWildBedminster@virginmedia.com ]
Goodgym does Good
Goodgym members ran in, planted plants in planters at the South Bristol Baths and then ran away again. This is part of the wilding of Dame Emily Park and its environs.
Swift Correction
Thanks to Peter who put me right on swifts. In the last newsletter I confused them with house martins, at least regarding nest building. No mud involved with swifts, but they do nest in roofs and new building techniques are making that difficult. Therefore, google ‘swift brick’ for a possible DIY solution.
Thanks too, to people who sent in other information and pictures. More please for the newsletter and also our facebook page: BS3 Wildlife Group. [ MyWildBedminster@virginmedia.com ]
Hedgehogs
There is a very good article on city hedgehogs in May’s South Bristol Voice (p11) by Alex Morss. Alex is an Avon Wildlife Trust Champion and a BS3 Wildlife Group member. Lots of good ideas about how we can help to increase the hedgehog population across the city, especially as parts of the countryside are becoming increasingly unfavourable to these creatures.