How To Attract Wildlife To Your Garden: The Ultimate Guide

Like us humans, water is vital for wildlife to survive - yet is often overlooked. Most people will leave out bread and berries for the birds, but forget about providing water too. Adding a water feature like a pond is a great way to significantly increase the chances of attracting new wildlife to your garden. If adding a pond seems a little drastic, a bird bath is an easy and cheap alternative. If you do add a pond, remember to make the edges quite shallow allowing easy access to the water for toads, frogs and newts.

If you do add a pond to your garden, ensure you add some water plants. This will attract insects that frogs and other amphibious animals like to eat, creating a fantastic food source.

Adding a variety of food for birds to feed on is a quick way to attract new wildlife to your garden. A bird feeder is a great way to do this. By changing the food on offer over the winter to high fat, will enable the birds to survive the cold winter months and return the following year. Alternatively you may want to lay the food on a bird table. This will enable other animals like squirrels to feast on it as well. If you do place bird feeders in your garden, remember to place them in places that cats and other predators cannot reach.

Planting berry trees like holly is a great way to provide food for a variety of animals throughout the year, especially throughout the winter. You need to plant them now if you want them ready for the winter months. For earlier in the year, avoid throwing any over ripe fruit away. Cut it up and add it to your bird table for the animals to eat.

If you have fruit trees, don’t be too quick to pick up fallen apples, pears etc from the floor. Fallen fruit is an easy and vital source of food for foxes, badgers etc.

Grow your grass long. Keep a patch of grass in your garden quite long. This not only creates a fantastic habitat for animals, but attracts insects which are a vital source of food for other animals.

Bees are attracted to bright, vivid coloured flowers. Not only will planting flowers attract bees, it will attract other animals too. Bees are also needed to help spread pollen from one plant to the next helping make your garden flower during the spring and summer months.