Top Ten Actions for a Wildlife Friendly Garden
Looking back over the last 5 years on what's worked for us
Kia ora e hoa, hello my friend🦆
Did I say thanks for filling out my poll the other week? If not - thank you!🙏🏽 I started this newsletter on a whim - I just get so excited about the growing abundance of wildlife we get in our garden (though I’m not sure about the magpies, who are our newest garden guests) that I had to find some way to get it out of my system. I am thrilled you are happy to hear about it & hope that you are learning as much as I am.
Over recent days, we have been getting treated to a beautiful dawn chorus. With the sun rising earlier, so do the manu (birds) and I love waking up to their music. They all seem to be enjoying our blossoming plums - like the tūī above.🎵 I live in hope that one day we will hear the chorus that explorers of centuries gone by were treated to:
“…their voices were certainly the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with the most tuneable silver sound imaginable to which maybe the distance was no small addition... they begin to sing at about 1 or 2 in the morn and continue till sunrise…” - botanist Joseph Banks, January 1770
I’ve recently finished reading Footprints on the Land, by Richard Wolfe. It was on the new books shelf at my local library and caught my attention. It chronicles the impact of humans on the landscape of Aotearoa, and is beautifully written.
While I broadly understood how much of our forests we have lost, and how many of our endemic animals we have forced to extinction, I had no idea of the vast changes we have made to the physical landscape - quarrying Auckland’s volcanoes, for example, and all the wetlands that have been drained for housing or farmland.
I also learned that the tussock-covered hills of central Otago was once filled with forest where, amongst other manu, moa would roam freely. With a growing population comes larger towns & cities, and more land devoted to agriculture. For me, it reinforced the importance of home gardens as sanctuaries for wildlife.
It frustrates me to no end that individuals have to make up for bad decision-making on the part of government, but I love that we’re able to do something. We’ve had this garden for almost five years now, and reflecting back I’ve come up with my top ten actions we’ve taken over the past five years for making this a safe space for our garden friends.
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