Post 440 - An Awesome Autumn Nourishing Nectar Source

The patch of Asters

Bumble Bees were feeding

Hey everyone - Post 440 today and I didn't have to go far for this post. It was a lovely sunny day and I saw quite a lot of activity on one little patch so I thought I ought to write about it.

As were little flies...

...and big flies...

...and shiny flies!

We keep patches of our garden quite wild (something you can tell by just looking at how manic it is) and we have some quite nice plants growing, there are a few native wild plants in the garden, but nearly all of them Mum and Dad chose because they are great for wildlife such as the Asters which was the little busy patch in my garden today. They flower quite late and so are a great source of nectar for lots of different insects. I often overlook the insects in my own garden, so this is the time to highlight pretty much all of the ones that I see not just on the Asters, but all over my garden.

But first, talking about how wild my garden is, I thought I'd talk a little bit about Rewilding. If you don't know what this is, it's basically a project to make the UK (and the world) a little bit more wild again, of course with a little management from us. Check out this site to find out more about Rewilding in Britain

A Red Admiral joined the feast

Basically this would involve, for example, letting rivers follow their own course and re-introducing some species back into the wild again. This has been done with Beevers and some people want to see more pine martens, lynx and possibly even wolves back in our UK countryside.  In my garden, I can't really do this on such a large scale (not sure what the local cats would think about a Lynx!) but I can let the plants do what they want and don't use ANY pesticides, weedkillers or artificial fertilisers and just let the wildlife live as long as it can and prosper in its environment... :)

It stayed for a while.

Hoverflies had a feed then decided
to make more hoverflies!

There's lots of different types of plant that we often overlook. Things like Ivy, now I don't have many pictures of Ivy or the facts at the moment, but luckily, Alex (@appletonwild) on Twitter, did a great blog on it already and how good it is for wildlife right now! Click here to see it!

Anyway, like I said at the start, I see so many different types of insects in just my garden (I think some days I see as many if not more than I see when I'm out at the forest)  that I could easily do a blog post on them. Well, I'm doing one now! The variety of things that I see is immense. From Tree Bumblebees nesting in the eaves of my house, to solitary wasps laying their eggs in dung flies, and from hoverflies mating to Red Admirals sunning themselves on the Buddleia. And that's not even getting down to anything wingless! What one of my policies goes like this: I love birds, in fact, they are probably my favourite part of nature. And twitching can also be fun too! My life list is something like 187 and I went to go twitch the Purple Swamphen in Lincolnshire and there were some people there that had come up from Birmingham. We had set off at about half five in the morning, and they must have set off at about the same time. And why were we all there? Just to try and see this one bird (which no-one actually got in the end that day). But that`s the way it is with twitching and we all live in hope of catching a glimpse, it's why we do it :)

My favourite photo of the day - a Honey Bee

When I go, I usually just go for as long as I want to, most times it ends up at about 2 or 3 hours, and I honestly really like doing it. I find it hard though to sit there for 12 hours like I've heard some people do, especially when you could just pop into your garden to see something which can be, in my opinion, just as amazing as seeing a particularly rare bird. All the different insects you can see is amazing! And if you're still on the hunt for something rare, you might even find a completely undiscovered species!

I hope you enjoyed this and take something from it and see how astonishing your back garden really is! I watched the insects for quite a while and decided to make a little film of them feeding.



Hope you enjoyed,

Z.