Friday, 13 May 2016

Native Species and Wildlife Connections!

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!

Wildflower seeds that arrived in the post!

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