Features: Garden wildlife

Life-changing encounters with garden birds

I suppose that in common with many people, my earliest meaningful contact with nature came through encounters with birds in the garden of my parents house when I was just a youngster.

Revelations

Blue tit in my parent's garden I can still remember the emotional impact of my first sight of a blue tit in that garden: I really couldn't believe that an animal so beautiful and exotic-looking could be found outside my own back door. It opened up a whole new world to me and spurred me on to explore the wider countryside. But encounters with birds in the garden - my own space - always left a special impression on me.

New generations

Now that I am older and have children of my own, it gives me particular satisfaction that my own garden can introduce the wonders of wildlife to them in the same way that my parent's garden did for me. My own children have been even more fortunate than I was, encountering kingfishers and waxwings among others in our gardens.

It never ends...

One of the fascinating things about wildlife gardening is the unpredictability of it. Things rarely stay the same in nature and even after 40 years in the same house, my parents are still seeing new and exciting birds in their garden - green woodpecker being a recent addition to their list.

Even familiar garden birds never lose their capacity to surprise and delight us in new ways; it's their very unpredictability - the fact that we can lose as well as acquire them - which makes them special. We can choose our garden plants, but when it comes to birds, it is they who choose the gardens.