Wildlife and Gardens - Part 1

Even before the pale green haze covers the woodland, I can tell when spring is coming by the increased activity of our resident bird population. The winter visitors leave; the summer residents arrive and they start discussing territory in louder and more exuberant song.

As temperatures rise above the 40F (4.44C) mark, my gardening blood also begins to stir, and swift forays out to check on emerging plant noses and shift piles of soggy leaves from pale foliage merge into longer and longer periods in the garden as the spring tempo picks up.

Spring is a time of garden crawling as winter's debris are removed and early weeds given a swift pull. Garden crawling brings the gardener's eye right down to plant and earth level so it's easy to observe the activity of normally invisible residents as they go about their business of turning plant debris into humus. Getting right down to the ground also makes the gardener more invisible to the other inhabitants of the garden space, so they, too, go about their business unaware of the human presence close by.

On a beautiful spring day, it's so easy to stop the rush to take care of overdue clean up and just enjoy and observe the lives of the others who live in the garden. Engaging in this pleasurable activity the other day got me to thinking about wildlife and gardens; what makes a garden attractive to wildlife; what I have to do to protect my cherished plants from wildlife and just what constitutes "wildlife".

With the notion that some of you may also be pondering along the same lines, this series will offer what I've observed over the years of sharing my garden with the many other creatures who enrich my gardening experience, tax my ingenuity and make life interesting on many levels.

Since my garden is in a wooded area, I host just about every creature indigenous to my area. There are other houses on two sides of our property, but they are separated from my garden by belts of wild growth, as is the road on another side. The third side is nearly two acres of wild woods connecting to other wooded properties that loosely connect to a small wooded parkland that follows a medium sized stream bed to the river. It used to be all woods but the advent of new houses over the years has broken the chain. This has had an observable impact on the creatures who live in this area. Deer have always been here, but only in the past five years or so have they been so pushed for space that they have done heavy damage to my garden and become my number one challenge.