I just wanted to highly recommend Collins Complete Guide to British Wildlife: A Photographic Guide to Every Common Species (Complete British Guides)
This books has so far managed to help me identify our Common Darter, Dragon Fly and also our Common Newts.
Well I got a bit of a shock the other evening! There I was lifting more of the pamment tiles when all of a sudden just where I was lifting I spotted what I thought was an old plastic toy animal. However, it was not there a second before. So I lifted it up only to find it was not plastic but real. My next assumption was that it was well and truly dead – then in blinked at me and I nearly dropped it in shock!
We have decided that in order to get the very most out of our outside space we need some help! Therefore we have found ourselves a garden designer, Sam, and are both really excited to have her working with us and can’t wait to start the design process! We currently have three parcels of space – the current garden and the two separate paddocks – and know what we want but not where it should all go … just can’t get our heads around it! Ultimately we want to create a kids’ play area, a vegetable plot/kitchen garden, a space for chickens (and maybe pigs!), and a formal garden with beds. We also want to encourage as much wildlife into the garden as possible and have a few spaces to escape with a cup of tea or glass of wine!
I did actually manange to find a few moments to relax at the weekend as well, and enjoy the sun along with this lovely dragon fly. I am no expert, but I think this is a Common Darter, possibly an immature male, Sympetrum striolatum. I am often accused of darting around as well, so maybe we have something in common.
Within just a few days of putting the new bird feeding station up we started to attract birds into the garden. We have already seen Long Tale Tits, Great Tits, Blue Tits, Robins, Green Finches and Sparrows on the feeder itself, with Collared Doves hoovering up the crumbs below.
