A year on Byron Road Part 1- Jan-June

Nature is all around us, we might not notice it, but its always present. Among the parked cars and tarmacked drives many species thrive, going about their business just as we do, their lives in parallel with ours. Lots of wildlife inhabit our gardens, nest in the eaves of our houses, share the same landscape. Wildlife inhabits every house and garden in every city and town, everywhere nature still abounds even in the least wild of places.

These HOUSE SPARROWS used the feathers from a dead pigeon as nesting material

Byron Road is no exception. A non-descript road in Whitton, a suburb of North West Ipswich. Built around the middle of the twentieth century, the front parts of the street are mainly concreted over, not offering too much habitat. But behind this grey facade the street has large overgrown leafy gardens, with large hedgerows and trees providing a great environment for birds. However this is still an urban setting so the numbers and species are fairly limited, and a lot of the vegetation is alien to native wildlife creating little food to feed young families, but the gardens are still better for birds than the surrounding farmland.

STARLING

The gardens together form one large habitat beyond the borders of each house. Whilst working in my garden the birds will be around me, they are so used to humans that unless I get too close, they are fine with my presence.
Like every house in the street I have a large garden, although it is shared with four people. Centre stage is the large sycamore tree, with various smaller trees growing around. The main weed, a wild plant I don't want to keep are little sycamore buds, which grow in profusion, and I often have to pick them out of my allotment plots.

A local pair of COLLARED DOVES

When we talk about urban birds there's one species that is characteristic of the concrete world. The formerly ubiquitous HOUSE SPARROW, is a species that lives only in urban areas, it is not a native species having followed civilisation out from the Middle East. There is a small flock in my area, numbering around twenty individuals. They descend upon my feeders, eat its seeds and strip it clean in one day. All the Sparrows in the area form distinct, separate flocks that don't seem to interact with each other, they are each different entities. They are resident birds spending all their time within a small area, that consists of a few houses. Although still common in a lot of places, such as Whitton, this species population has crashed. A lot of urban Ipswich lies empty of this charismatic species, a part of the city as any church or football ground.

WOOD PIGEON

During the winter months, a time of cold, the street is inhabited by a large flock of STARLINGS. Several hundred strong, this flock perches on a tree or a TV antennae and I can see over a hundred in my garden at any one time. In the evenings there are many small murmarations as birds roost in the area.
Their numbers decline around March until there is only the local breeding population left. One pair usually nests in the eaves of the roof of my house. They are one of the first birds to fledge young, around the middle of May, maybe raising a couple of birds. The locally bred birds form flocks for a couple of months before disappearing in the Autumn and thereafter returning in the winter.

Fledged STARLING

A pair of CROWS are resident in the area, although they change their nesting location each year. I have seen them predate the nest of a blackbird, as the adult birds looked on helpless. However they keep the large gulls away flying up to chase any birds away. Another resident species is the COLLARD DOVE, which are doing pretty well, I can often have 25 or more in the garden.

One of the local cats. Thankfully they are too fat and lazy to catch any birds

The garden I inherited was a just a grass lawn, which is so boring and sterile for wildlife. So one Autumn I decided to create an allotment bed, when I had time between jobs. This soon increased to two more. I now have enough to rotate crops, broad beans and potatoes which grow anywhere and can withstand anything the weather throws at them, to carrots and parsnips which are a bit more delicate. I also scraped away the top layer of soil nearby and planted with wildflower seed, which worked really well, and the area is now an overgrown mess, which is good as nature loves mess. Come mid-April, the first of the flowers to come out are BORAGE, followed by RIBWORT, RED CAMPION and SORREL.

Young BLACKBIRD

As the garden flowers start to bloom, so the dawn chorus comes to a peak, and I savour waking up to their music every morning.
The garden is bounded by a large conifer hedge which somehow has elder trees growing in the middle. This thick foliage is the man nesting area in the garden, attracting ROBINS, BLACKBIRDS and WRENS, where in a good year they can raise several broods.
Most years CHIFFCHAFFS and BLACKCAPS are enticed to sing in the garden but they only last a day or two before moving on.
I have several nest boxes around the garden, which often attracts the attention of the local GREAT TITS, who often raise several young.

RED ADMIRAL

By late April the leaves appear on the trees, it often takes me surprise, they tend to appear as if overnight. This makes bird watching a lot more difficult as the birds are now hidden under the dense foliage. I have one BLUEBELL plant growing in my garden. I rope off the area immediately under the tree, to protect from being cut, allowing flowers to grow and apart from the bluebell, its an overgrown mishmash of RED DEAD NETTLE, CLEAVERS and COW PARSLEY.

BLUEBELL

In the first week of May attention is shifted to the skies to look out for the first returning SWIFTS, and there can be as many as thirty birds reeling through the skies before they settle down to breed. Some still nest in the area, under the eaves of the rooves of a few buildings. Swifts originally nested in holes in isolated trees. But as the trees have been cut down and villages and town have grown up, the species has completely forgotten its natural environment and now nests exclusively in the urban environment.
However other urban birds like HOUSE MARTIN have all but disappeared from Ipswich.

MAGPIES drinking from the gutter

Come the spring butterflies emerge and there are plenty of the commoner species in the garden, but I think its the HOLLY BLUE,  a species which comes out mid-April, which I see as the quintessential garden butterfly, feeding and laying eggs on the profusions of ivy present. They have increased a lot since I let the garden grow a bit more wilder, their blue wings fluttering on the breeze.

HOLLY BLUE - the quintessential garden butterfly

Gardens form an area larger than all the nature reserves in the country. Just think what could happen if people allowed part of their garden to revert to nature. Sure its mainly the commoner birds that are found in this habitat, but a lot of our urban wildlife is under serious threat. Half of the bird population that has decreased since the 1970s is made up of one species - the house sparrow.

DANDELION seed head, one of the few flowers to grow on the lawn

The garden is one of those accidental  things that somehow benefited our wildlife. These private refuges of ours offer a home for animals just as much as it does to people. With such massive habitat loss happening in the countryside gardens are a good refuge for a lot of species, and they rely on us to help them.

This blog covers the first six months of the year. Another blog will follow, probably at the end of the year.