Bill Oddie’s How to Watch Wildlife

Other garden wildlife

Birds may well be the easiest kind of wildlife to watch, but let’s not ignore the other creatures that can come into our gardens. For children, these can be even more of a delight. The truth is that you will be lucky to see a fox or a badger in your garden, even if you are a bit of an insomniac. There are parts of Britain, though, where foxes are very common, especially in urban and suburban areas. Badgers really do only come out at night, or occasionally at dusk, and you’ll need to be close to proper woodland to stand a chance of seeing one of these visitors.

Bill's top tips

_ Butterflies and other insects love wild flowers – especially native varieties.

_ Butterflies love buddleia, too, also known as the ‘butterfly bush’.

_ Birds love berries, such as holly, ivy and mistletoe.

_ Climbers such as honeysuckle and clematis are ideal places for birds to roost and nest.

Squirrels – well, they are not everyone’s favourite. But surely everyone is entertained by the sight of a squirrel defying all claims that bird feeders are squirrel-proof. Their ingenuity is extraordinary. We have to accept that if we put up bird feeders, with them will come squirrels.

Many of us remember Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tiggywinkle, and hedgehogs live on as a favourite. But if you do have a visiting hedgehog, put out dog or cat food, as bread soaked in milk will be too filling for it to cope with.

Smaller creatures such as bees, beetles and bugs are often forgotten by us adults – rather unfairly perhaps. Bumblebees are in decline and butterflies, too, need a bit more encouragement, which you can do by planting flowers that attract the bees to collect pollen and feed on nectar.

Water creatures are also fascinating; not only larger ones such as frogs, toads and newts, but also pond insects such as water boatmen and dragonfly larvae. By creating a pond, you will attract all kinds of wild creatures to even the smallest garden, especially if you vary the depth and put in lots of suitable aquatic plants, which will attract other wildlife.

Remember that wildlife ponds are better without ornamental fish as they tend to crowd out any native water creatures. And if you have children under ten, then it can be guaranteed that looking at frogspawn and watching tadpoles will provide hours of fun and an opportunity to learn from nature.

One final thought – make the most of your garden. By taking a bit of effort and providing food, water, shelter and perhaps a garden pond, you’ll make a big difference. It’s the easiest place to enjoy wildlife and, if you’re good to your local wildlife, it will repay you with hours of entertainment.

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Wildlife beyond the garden gate

If you’re a city dweller, you may not think there’s much to see where you live. It’s easy to assume you have to travel to the coast or Britain’s deepest countryside for the true wildlife experience. But that is not always the case.

The fact is that modern farming methods, and loss of habitat through development and road building, have hit our countryside wildlife pretty hard. But being adaptable creatures, much of our wildlife has been moving into towns and cities, helped by the ‘wildlife corridors’ such as rivers, railway lines and strips of woodland, which enable them to travel from one place to another.

There are all sorts of advantages to living in towns and cities. For a start they are much warmer than the surrounding countryside, thanks to the waste heat from buildings. There is also far more food: either provided deliberately or by our wasteful habits. That’s why in recent years birds like ‘seagulls’ (or plain ‘gulls’, as they should really be called) have moved into our urban areas, where they feed by scavenging on rubbish tips and roost during the night on reservoirs. They have also started to nest on the roofs of city buildings, where they can be heard even above the noise of the traffic.

So if you’re a townie, rejoice in the fact that British wildlife is making itself seen and heard in cities everywhere. A good place to start is your local park: a green space where the wildlife can find food and shelter. Canals and rivers are also excellent places to look, as are odd sites such as churchyards and cemeteries – anywhere with a small patch of green and some areas of rough vegetation where the creatures can hide. Wildlife watching in cities isn’t always the most scenic of experiences, but it’s certainly full of surprises.

Bill's top tip

_ Get a friend to take you round their local patch and show you what’s there and what to look out for. Next time, try visiting the place on your own – you’ll be amazed at what you can find. This can be a real boost to your confidence.

Getting a local patch

Whether you live in the town or the countryside, a suburb or a village, you should be able to find yourself what naturalists call a ‘local patch’ – a place you can visit on a regular basis throughout the seasons to get to know the resident wildlife.

Urban parks are ideal as they offer a self-contained area that you can walk round in an hour or so. Other good local patches are gravel pits, reservoirs, woods and perhaps your nearest nature reserve – anywhere you can see a good variety of wildlife at different times. Another advantage is that most places like this are already being watched by a regular visitor, who may be able to give you some tips on what you are likely to see.

By visiting a local patch once or twice a week – or even a couple of times a month – throughout the year, you’ll soon become aware of the seasonal changes, such as when birds begin to sing, or the comings and goings of migrants. Over time you’ll be amazed at how much you have actually picked up over a few months of visiting.

One way to find a local patch is to check your local Ordnance Survey map using either the 1:50,000 scale Landranger series or, better still, the larger-scale 1:25,000 Pathfinder. Look for patches of water and woodland, which are good base camps for wildlife. Or contact your regional wildlife trust or ask at your library for information on local societies or bird clubs. The library may even have an annual report on your area’s wildlife.

But before you visit, check out details of access: although many places are open to the public or have footpaths running through them, at some, a permit or permission from the owner is required to gain entry.

Visiting nature reserves

If you’re lucky enough to have a nature reserve in your area, here’s a bit of advice. Your first visit to a reserve can fall short of expectations. Perhaps with the memory of zoos and nature programmes from childhood, the very notion of a reserve suggests a place teeming with wildlife from dawn to dusk. Few actually deliver this. In fact, you can sometimes walk for a good 20 minutes from a reserve entrance or car park before you see anything at all. And if you go into a hide expecting to see the birds performing in front of you, well, prepare to be disappointed. However, good things do come to those who wait – and look, and listen – and come back again, and again.

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Keeping a record

If you’re new to watching wildlife, then the very idea of keeping notes or even a diary might seem too much like hard work. If that’s how you feel, then fine. It isn’t compulsory and, if work or family pressures mean that you don’t have all that much time to get out in the field, you might prefer to spend that time watching wildlife rather than writing about it.

On the other hand, taking a few notes of what you see doesn’t take that much extra time and has several advantages:

Taking notes is a good way of learning about what you see: it helps you focus on how to identify what you are looking at, or to note down an interesting aspect of a creature’s behaviour.

Identifying what you see is often hard to do in the field. So some people prefer to take notes as they watch the subject, then try to identify it at leisure. If you’re good at drawing, you may even want to do a quick sketch – even if you’re not, a drawing can help you pinpoint particular field marks.

Keeping a record of what you see helps you to build up a picture of what is around in your neighbourhood (or anywhere you visit), which can be helpful when you return there.

You might also decide that you want to keep a wildlife diary; something that you write up at home after a day out at a reserve, say, or other trip. Other diaries you can keep can include the wildlife you see in your garden or at your local patch, building up a portrait of the year’s wildlife sightings. Either buy a desk diary (wait until the end of January when they are sold off at half price!), or just use a large notebook and add your own dates.

Write as much or as little as you want. Some people make long, formal lists of species, others simply jot down their memories of the day. This is your diary, so make it something you will treasure when looking back and re-reading it in years to come. Some birdwatchers have notebooks going back more than half a century, enabling them to follow their progress from early childhood to maturity and old age; a tremendously satisfying personal record.

Notebooks and diaries also have another purpose: recording the changes in your local wildlife over periods of time. As you write up your sightings from year to year, this will allow you to notice any changes that occur: such as the first date in spring you saw primroses in the nearby wood, or the last date in autumn there were house martins over your home.

Bill's top tips

_ Writing when outdoors can be difficult, especially if it’s windy or raining, or your hands are beginning to freeze. Some people take notes using a small hand-held tape recorder. It’s much easier, and you don’t have to take your eye off the creature you’re looking at.

_ One of the great joys of keeping notes is that they will bring back memories – hopefully happy ones – of days in the field. You don’t need to add loads of detail, but it is helpful to write down things that will jog your memory. So rather than writing, ‘Barn owl – 1’, why not add something to help you recall the experience, perhaps even years later? You could write, for example, ‘A barn owl flew right past us as we were walking back to the car park – a lovely sight as it went past on silent wings like a ghost’

Such simple records, kept over several decades by amateur wildlife watchers, have proved to be an unexpected asset for scientists investigating the effects of global warming on our wildlife.

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Basic equipment

What equipment to buy is always a daunting subject for a beginner. Do you immediately get the very best binoculars, every field guide in the shop and a full set of clothing for all possible weather conditions? Or do you make do with the bins your dad used in the Second World War, The Observer’s Book of Birds and an old anorak?

As you might expect, the best approach to choosing equipment for wildlife watching is somewhere in between. Don’t be tempted to get everything at once: start gradually and you’ll be less likely to buy something you don’t really need. On the other hand, there are some items of equipment that you really should get before you go out in the field for the first time.

Binoculars

There are several things to think about when choosing a pair of binoculars:

Price: How much can you afford?