SUNSHINE GARDENING

Hasn't it been a glorious spring and summer! It's mid July and another heat wave is lighting up our Dorset garden. Much of our wildlife loves the sun, the plants too, us as well, so we thought we’d share some pretty bits of our wildlife friendly garden with you as a way of celebrating summer.

You probably remember last years wet summer and winter but all that rainwater filled the aquifers, the springs flowed, our six ponds were topped up and the growth in our many trees has been remarkable.

 

And once this glorious spring sunshine started shining, our shrubs have blossomed like never before.

our little meadow is rich with colourful ‘weeds’. The yellow flowers behind the pond iris are goat's-beard and there are oxeye daisies, ragged robin, buttercups and devils-bit scabious among others and earlier in the season, snakeshead fritillaries, lots of southern marsh orchids and as the varied grasses grow, it becomes a haven for many insects, little mammals too, food for the tawny owls and foxes. 

The 'No Mow May' rule extends into June and July of course!

Brimstone butterflies love feeding on the goat's-beard in the spring.

The pond beside our cottage is home to a shoal of small rudd that in turn attracts an occasional otter, no doubt a privilege for us, though also a mixed blessing as the otters trash the ecosystem while chasing the fish and that spoils the pond for damsels and dragonflies.

This female four-spotted chaser had to be rescued from the water after a night-time otter raid had sunk it, but many of our shoals of minnows seem to survive the predation and spawn successfully several times a year.

Our local stock doves enjoy bathing in the stream too and the otters get particularly excited if they discover eels wriggling up the stream from the river Stour. They travel an epic eight thousand mile round trip to and from the Sargasso Sea where they breed, so are the most unlikely of visitors to our garden. What remarkable and increasingly rare creatures they are, and the recovery of otter populations can't help in their decline as eels are a favourite food. This inquisitive otter was photographed in our main pond while hunting for eels on a frosty February morning a couple of years ago.

With all the water in our garden, it's not surprising that our woodland oaks and birches grow so well, and having added lots of rhodos, acers and azalias over the years, the wood is turning into a colourful jungle. Luckily, we don't like tidy and neither does our wildlife.

The woodland shrubs have never flowered as enthusiastically as this in the past, so we have the sunshine and wet winter to thank for the show. What's more, in the spring, our wisterias were the equal of any flowering we've enjoyed in recent years, their scent being a real treat.

Our bird life has also given us joy, because our hand-tame robin raised five chicks by the cottage this spring and they became hand-tame too, all except one that became a sparrow hawk's lunch.

Our birds come both small and big, very big, for one day I was out  pruning when something made me look up, and there above my head was a white-tailed eagle, circling over the middle of our patch. It was one of the Isle of White re-introductions that spends much of it's time with it's mate in nearby Poole Harbour. We hope and prey that they will settle down and breed there soon.

It looked huge, it was, and better still, my wife Sue was able to share this magical moment. The eagle drifted slowly towards our friends house, so I grabbed a phone, called Jane and Andrew to tell them an eagle might be over their garden, and it was! So it was a happy 'harmonic convergence' and served to prove there is good wildlife news among so much environmental doom and gloom. 

And if you add the nesting ospreys just down the road near Poole Harbour, and the red kites that fly over us most weeks, there is much to see and celebrate.

Meanwhile, everything keeps on growing, so I'd better stop writing and go out to offer some TLC to our jungle, but not before a cuppa by our lovely clematis. They've been wonderful this year, and for all of you too hopefully, so do enjoy the sunshine for there's dozens of butterflies doing just that out there now. This is a lovely silver-washed fritillary and it's like the good old happy days.

SCREAMING FOR HELP

 

It’s early May and the swifts are back, scything noisily through our skies in celebration of completing their ten thousand mile non-stop round trip from central Africa.
 

The swift’s dark winged silhouettes sweep above our streets, bringing happiness to us birders, and celebrated in poetry and prose because swifts are given the accolade of bringing the summer with them. No wonder we love ‘em!

    we're hoping that one day soon, the swifts will nest in the towers of our Minster and the blue sky will be alive again

The rooftops of Wimborne Minster and other Dorset towns and villages provide them with homes, the swift pairs travelling north together, even mating on the wing and never touching down until they reach last year’s nest site. Their homes are shared with us, the cracks and crevices in our ancient buildings.

Swifts enjoy each others company, so they form nesting colonies, their evenings being ‘party time’ as they call to each other, their screaming evening flights brightening our summer skies.

Flying at a steady sixty plus miles an hour, feeding on insects as they travel, they will have flown millions of miles in their lifetime, for a swift’s average life-span is nine years and if all goes well, they will raise two to three young each year in their cramped quarters.

Egg laying, hatching and fledging takes about seven weeks and when these young leave the nest, they indulge in a vital stage in their future as they prospect our roof-tops and swift boxes for vacant des.res.

Then they head off for their winter quarters south of the Equator, flying more than 800kms a day during their migration. Impressive birds!

They cross the Sahara before reaching the lush forests of central Africa, and thanks to satellite tracking technology, these maps show the exact location of their travels. The other map shows the common swifts worldwide distribution. 

red depicts the swifts breeding range, blue their winter quarters

 

In preparation for their breeding years, swifts will usually return to their natal grounds in their second year of life, when they can start looking for suitable breeding sites and mates.

By the time they return to breed in Dorset, typically at four years old, these young birds will have already flown a hardly believable 300,000 miles, yes, that far, never touching the ground, kept aloft and even sleeping on their long, scimitar wings. 

They are such amazing birds that they give us every reason to want to try to help them survive and prosper. And they certainly need our help. During the last twenty seven years, swift numbers in the UK have declined by 66% and sadly, Wimborne is one of those towns suffering these steep declines.

Swifts have now been added to the Red List of conservation concern and the British Trust for Ornithology have been researching the reasons, citing poor summer weather, a decline in insect food...

... and lack of nesting sites as the major causes.

Sadly, we can do nothing about our poor summer
weather, but we can certainly help provide an increase in invertebrate prey by creating wildlife friendly gardens and planting insect attracting flowers and shrubs.

Even better, we can certainly provide more nest sites and us Swift Champions are installing nesting boxes across towns, along with ‘calling boxes’ that cry out to attract the swifts to vacant nest sites. And they work a treat!

As an example, I have a friend and fellow swift lover in nearby Ringwood, living in a normal two story house, though actually far from ‘normal’ because John's created a wildlife haven.  

His walls are now covered in a virtual city of nest boxes, including many swift boxes, and when he installed them one late summer and added a swift calling box, the swifts colonised within a few days, and since then he’s usually attracted up to seven breeding pairs.

He has a battle with sparrows and starlings that try to take over the boxes for their own nests, so he keeps the box entrances covered until the 1st May. This gives the swifts a chance of winning their nest sites back when they return from Africa.

John’s boxes are installed at about seventeen feet high, giving the young swifts a safe drop out of the nest of at least three metres so they don’t crash into the ground on their first flight. John’s project has been a great success for several years now and there’s no reason why other swift lovers like us couldn’t be equally successful.

Many Dorset swift initiatives are in full swing now, so please get in touch with our champions if you wish to help swifts by having a swift box installed on your property, especially if you have large overhanging eaves.

we're hoping that we'll be allowed to fix swift boxes on our Town Hall this spring

 

If your home looks suitable, us champions would love to have a chat, so do please get in touch with your nearest Swift Group, listed below, and let’s see what we can do. Alternatively, if your house isn’t suitable but you can help with surveys, or other group tasks, do drop us a line:

Wimborne Swifts - WIMBORNESWIFTS@GMAIL.COM CHOG Swifts - swifts@chog.org.uk
 

With your help, there is every hope that within a year or two, our Dorset streets will get increasingly noisy as these charismatic birds take part in their screaming parties and fill our skies with their remarkable flights of celebration. 

These champions of the sky are looking at us to help them, so please do what you can right now.
                                                                    

                                                                        ---
I have extracted these pics from my office 'magic-box' and am unable to credit these skillful photographers, so I hope they appreciate that this blog has simply been created in the hope of helping our beleaguered swifts recover and fill our skies with joy.
So thank you all. Hugh Miles.