This year, Chester Zoo have launched “Wildlife Connections”,
which is a project to create wildlife friendly spaces. This can include
planting some native wildflower seeds, creating bird boxes, bat boxes or even
cutting a small hole in your fence to help save our little hedgehogs! On the
website, you can report all the wildlife you see out and about, and I have recorded a lot of mallard ducks and blackbirds already! Today in the post, I
received my free wildflower seeds from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and
I really cannot wait to plant them! If you want to do the same, head on over to
http://www.growwilduk.com and see if
there are any free seeds left! If there are none, don’t worry, wild flower
seeds are cheap at garden centres and easily available.
This campaign is incredibly important as UK wildlife is
unfortunately declining! Our bees need help! Intensive farming has led to the
decline in wildflowers and therefore, bees! We’ve lost two species of bee
(Cullem’s bumblebee and the short-haired bumblebee) from the UK in the past 50
years, so let’s get growing some flowers and save the fluffy bumblebee!
Another group that is often forgotten about is the bat!
There are over 1100 species of bat in the world, ranging from tiny fruit bats,
to large flying foxes! All of the UK bats are actually insectivores, so if
there are bats in the area, it means there are lots of bugs and a healthy
ecosystem! Bats are at risk due to habitat loss and destruction of bat roosts.
If you have bats in your loft, it’s a good thing – they enjoy living in your
house and it is actually illegal to destroy or disrupt a roost in the UK, so do
make sure you seek advice before carrying out any rennovations.
And finally, on to hedgehogs! These little guys are
susceptible to being killed on the roads, getting caught in bonfires before
they are lit, modern gardens and also to garden pesticides. Things you can do
include dedicating a small corner of the garden to be slightly overgrown to
allow for foraging, creating a hedge for them to hide in, or piling up leaves
to encourage bugs to the garden for the hedgehogs to eat. Also in summer, try
placing a shallow dish of water out so they can have a nice drink to hydrate
themselves.
Now obviously the UK is home to many many species that are
threatened (the great crested newt, for example!), but I have just narrowed it
down to 3 here.
I hope you’ve found this interesting to read and I hope to
post again soon!
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| Wildflower seeds that arrived in the post! |
