Tag: wildlife shelters

The wildlife pond and hide at BAC – part two

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date March 24, 2015
6 Comments on The wildlife pond and hide at BAC – part two

As promised we make a return visit to see the work we have been doing on the development of our pond and hide at our allotment site, Bowbrook Allotment Community. In this part we shall look at our hide, some tree surgery and our new duck tube.

So first let us return to our new hide. If you remember those pictures of us rolling the battered and rather shaky old shed you will be surprised by the photos of it finished. So how about a before and after pair of pics? We made the hide for our allotment youngsters, our Roots and Shoots group, to give them the chance to secretly and quietly watch the life of our pond. With this in mind we set to work on our renovation which took an amazingly large number of volunteer hours.

Whenever we go by the pond we can’t help but smile at the transformation! As you can see the old hide was firstly repainted outside by my young apprentice Thomas before we handed it over to two volunteer helpers Sean and his Dad Vince. They are great carpenters so brilliant volunteer helpers to have on board. They put fresh felt on the roof and fabricated a strong framework inside the shed. They made a concrete and slab base and placed the newly strengthen shed on a framework of wooden struts.

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Thomas returned to give the shed another coat of wood preserver and I added a sign I created from wooden letters. It began to look the part from the outside but even more so once the two men added a new sheet of perspex to the window and added two hatches for clear viewing on dry days. These can be seen in the photo below.

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Within a few weeks Sean and Vince with extra help from Sean’s children had put up a noticeboard, made a kneeling bench and shelf for leaning on when the children used the hatches and window. The pictures below show first the bench and secondly the view the children get from the hatch.

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This is the view our Roots and Shoots youngsters will get as they open the hide door. You will see that Jude and I have added identification charts for birds and dragonflies and damselflies and a poster displaying the life on and under the surface of a pond. We also made a little bookcase from a vegetable crate and placed in it some wildlife books for youngsters. We also mounted a whiteboard on which we are inviting the children to note their observations. The final touches are a pair of binoculars a notebook for children to jot down their nature notes.

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Last job of course was a celebratory cup of coffee perching on the children’s bench and admiring everyone’s handiwork and great efforts.

Now let us enjoy a bit of tree surgery carried out so professionally by some more of our volunteers, Pete and Mike. As mentioned in part one we have a few elderly Ash trees around the pond which for safety sake need remedial work. Earlier on we managed to pull down broken branches that had rotted but got tangled in the lower branches as they fell, but this day was a day for the chain saw attachment on our strimmer head to get in the action. One large branch hung right over the pond to the far bank and was slowly splitting so getting lower and lower. The final cut shows the weakness.

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First Mike and Pete looked and stared and studied! They needed a strategy!!

This strategy involved rope thrown up and over a much higher and stronger upper bough, with which they could keep control of the branch once it was sawn through.

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Attachment attached and they were off!

The cut bough hanging obediently could then be pulled in and dealt with on dry land. It will soon be seating for the youngsters, edging for borders and parts of insect homes and log piles and brash heaps to help attract ads shelter wildlife. We discovered an awful lot of rot within the bough so it was great relief to see it down. Trouble is there are a few more going the same way.

Finally we need to look at our duck tube! The photo below shows why we need one! A pair of Mallards patiently waiting!

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Just follow the picture sequence below and watch Mike’s adventure. Before we made the dam and changed the drainage around it to gain depth for wildlfie the pond was rarely more than 6 inches or so deep!

He is a good chap is Mike! What would we do without him? And below the duck tube in pride of place in the pond in a position where the children can watch activity from their new hide. Brilliant!

We still have further work on the pond mostly planting but we have a plan for a floating island to give wildlife somewhere to find safety and shade. Pete and Mike have a plan as you might have guessed! But of course that may be the subject of a future post visiting our super wildlife pond! One piece of info I have not mentioned are the dimensions of the area, useful I think to put things in perspective and to emphasise the size of the project. The pool is 22 yards long by 11 yards at its widest point, and the marsh area at the one end is 9 yards by 7 yards at the widest point. Around the pool and marsh between the pond and the fence, the walk around together with the planted areas vary from 3 yards to 5 yards. Quite a size!

Tags beneficial insects, Bowbrook Allotment Community, communal gardens, community, community gardening, community spirit, duck tube, garden insects, garden wildlife, insect homes, insect shelters, mallards, wetland wildlife, wildlife gardening, wildlife ponds, wildlife shelters

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Pumpkins, a BBQ and Homes for Wildlife

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date November 5, 2013
5 Comments on Pumpkins, a BBQ and Homes for Wildlife

At the end of October we held our first ever family oriented working party social day at our allotments, Bowbrook Allotment Community. It was a great success even though the whole day was spent in wellies and waterproofs. The ground beneath our feet was saturated and occasional showers got us from above, but neither distracted us from our aims of the day.

We started just after one o’clock when a photographer from the local newspaper came to take some shots of families working together on our “Homes for Wildlife” projects and one of our most recent award, the RHS Britain in Bloom “National Award of Distinction” which we were awarded for our community involvement.

First task was to make some birdboxes and Wren Pouches. All the materials were collected together by one of our picnic benches and tools readied. It was heartening to see children, their parents and grandparents working together creating these nest boxes. Three generations together!

We made some hanging bug shelters too, created from broken flower pots, driftwood and bits of bark.

We wished also to make a couple of bug hotels, a small one along the fenceline and our most ambitious yet a 6 ft high creepy crawly cottage both based on recycled wooden pallets. We began with a stack of pallets and a collection of natural objects collected by allotment holders, sticks, old garden canes, stones, fir cones etc.

The “cottage” soon began to take shape as pallets were stacked and fixed together to give the basic structure.

All we have to do now is choose a name for our new insect home. We have challenged the youngsters from the allotments, our Roots and Shoots group, to choose a suitable one. So far we have a few ideas – “Minibeast Manor”, “Bugtique Hotel” and “Minibeast Metropolis”. The difficulty will be how to decide!

The smaller insect hotel was made from five pallets and again filled with objects that would provide shelter for wildlife. We finished it off with a stone pile, the perfect home for beetles.

The final jobs before our BBQ was to plant lots of acorns, sweet chestnuts and hazel nuts to grow on and plant in our hedgerows and to plant up a whole sack of daffodil bulbs alongside the paths in our meadows.

The BBQ brought us all back together and once darkness fell we lit our pumpkin lanterns. And we even found time for Jude to do some face painting.

As we enjoyed the BBQ the light disappeared and we prepared ourselves for the Twilight Walk, when we wandered around the site with lit pumpkins to light our way in search of sheds decorated as Spooky Sheds.

And as the night fell we disappeared into the gloom with our pumpkins to guide our way.

Tags allotments, bird boxes, Bowbrook Allotments, community gardening, garden wildlife, Halloween, insect homes, insects, organic gardening, outdoor sculpture, pumpkins, wildlife, wildlife shelters

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Wildlife Banks on the Lottie

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date November 19, 2011

On our allotment site at Bowbrook Allotment Community we try to keep all green waste on site, either by composting or re-using it in new situations. In earlier blogs I showed how we have made an array of insect shelters but the idea of creating wildlife banks to re-use turf is on a much larger scale.

When new beds are created in our Green Spaces around the lotties we have piles of turf left over. Some of this we stacked to make loam piles but we came up with the idea of making raised areas full of wildlife habitats and shelters. The photo above shows Jude, Geoff and Pete part way through the construction. Turves have already been layered alterating grass side up and grass side down, in our chosen shark’s fin shape, a design decided upon to reflect the shape of some of our mini-meadows. The first habitat is in place, the dry-stone wall.

The final layer of turf was laid grass side upwards and we planted insect-attracting plants in it, such as oxe-eye daisies and geranium phaeum. In the following autumn we planted small tulips and muscari and in spring we augmented this with bulbs “in the green”, snowdrops, wild daffodils, crocus and scillas. Some of these flowering bulbs provide a life line for early flying bees.

The buttercups soon burst out of the turf and added their yellow cheerfulness. The photo above shows another wildlife habitat – logs with holes of various sizes drilled in them – which we hope will attract solitary bees and provide shelter over winter for their eggs and larvae.

We have now constructed two such wildlife banks within our Green Spaces and keep adding odd plants as they are donated by members. Yesterday we planted some geraniums for example. The photo below shows one of the bumble bee nesting sites we have added. During the summer one of these was nested in by Field Mice and as bumble bees love nesting in old mouse holes we see this as a positive thing, giving us hope of bee residents moving in next year.