Have you got your landscaping eye on a tree in the garden but you’ve been hesitating on where to go with it? Well may I introduce the practice of Spear Coppicing to you? If you’re handy with a saw & ladder, it’s a way to turn a tree into a prominent wildlife feature, and cut back on the annual foliage. Over time the tree will become standing deadwood and become inhabitable to multiple birds, beetles, fungi, and small mammals. It remains strong & firm for far longer than most other naturally occurring dead trees whom mostly rot from the base up, as it will deteriorate from the uppermost ..read more

Grasslands and Meadows support a wide array of wildlife & plant-life, and in the UK the priority for habitat conservation attention is associated more with grasslands than with any other UK habitat type. Waxcap fungi, alongside some Pinkgills, Club, & Coral fungi, and Earth-tongue fungi, form a group of mushrooms that thrive merrily within types of unimproved or semi-improved grassland, forming the waxcap-grassland. The semi-improved term refers to a grassland’s treatment with fertilisers either in the past or at a low level. We refer to this land as “semi-improved” as it is a term th ..read more

A Quick Intro Ponds are areas of standing water up to 5 metres deep with 30% (or less) vegetation covering the water’s surface, and each with varying abundances of aquatic animals & plants, as they act as islands of habitat for a community of creatures. And if you have a cluster of ponds in any given landscape, i.e. the “pondscape”, an especially high biodiversity can arise compared to a single pond as a higher degree of connectivity and complexity forms. Value to Wildlife A healthy pond provides a habitat to both wildlife and plant-life due to the different offerings of resources compared ..read more

When we hear of wildlife conservation and habitat management, I am sure most of us envision lush green forests & grasslands with their associated fauna ambling about. And this is often the case, these habitats are frequently found in nature and offer many great resources for many species to then settle into these areas. However there are often situations where lush greenery is not the desired habitat, even though it usually is very popular. I’m talking about bared earth, the soil substrates exposed. To be completely clear here, I’m not referring to locations that are devoid of vegetation ..read more

When it comes to all Living Creatures, we can look at nature the same way we look at a society in that there are various methods of interacting & communicating, differing levels of relationship ranging from intimate to stranger, and multiple intentions to be found when socialising in the grand scheme of it all. I think, when viewed in this way, our perception of nature becomes more intuitive, especially when we use Ecology as our method of interpreting the functions of nature. In the Nature of Ecology [1]; A (Eco)system That Works I go through several steps to go into detail & highligh ..read more

If you’ve ever pondered on how to make your garden work for wildlife, I imagine you’ve looked online or through books on the various methods and techniques that wildlife conservationists have published and endorsed to let you develop your backyard into a wildlife paradise. These practices are some of the most useful concepts to implement into your garden to get a good result from, as they are advocated for a reason, and I very much would encourage you to do them. But for the sake of argument, why do we do them? To be clear I am not speaking in terms of “why bother” doing these practices, inste ..read more

Are you looking to begin another project in the garden for the sake of wildlife? Or instead are you perhaps looking to defend your garden from the pests that munch on your flowers and crops? Prepare to celebrate then, for you’re about to hit two birds with one stone! As is implied by the featuring title above, this is a method that aims to host insects whilst being able to protect a certain something, and in this case it’s the greenery in your garden. Whilst on the topic I want to shoot down any uncertainties, the “beetles” in this title is purely for the sake of alliteration, and is really in ..read more

I imagine at some point you have stopped and thought about the environment. It’s hard not too when it’s such a frequently raised topic of conversation the past few decades, mostly on the point of global climate change; but what aspects are actually involved when we talk about the environment? I’m sure you’ve heard of habitats and ecosystems, but do you know specifically what they are? And especially, in my eyes, what does it mean in reference to your green spaces & gardens? If you haven’t thought about this, well, I like to think it’s an interesting topic and so I’ll be talking about it an ..read more

Our yearly visits from Spring and Summer will naturally entail a background chorus of birds, no matter where you are when these seasons decide to swing by. Most likely (having found yourselves hear reading this) you appreciate the melodies of these natural-born singers as they flit about, chasing one-another across the sky. And although some may not appreciate their singing come the early morning chorus, we all undoubtably have an appreciation for bird-songs at one point or another. Along with their songs, colours, and overall enjoyable presence, it is one of the few animals we go out of our w ..read more

A flowers born to the wild, a Wildflower. It is dissociated from the common term “flower” due to one differing characteristic, and that is that they grow without deliberate human help (i.e. sowing or cultivating). In this sense, any flower may be a Wildflower if it’s seeds has found their way into a suitable habitat and spontaneously grow when the conditions are met. There are many ways to separate flowers into distinct categories, but Wildflowers is a widely recognised term in Habitat Conservation due to their self-propagating ability. All flowers are of a species that is specially adapted to ..read more