I was reminded that wildlife is literally on our doorstep last month when I caught Covid and was forced into self-isolation.
Bird-watching had to be confined to my garden for seven days but I was not complaining. It gave me some new material for a talk I was scheduled to give to the Lenah Valley Garden Club on gardening for birds. And in the long hours spent peering out of the windows overlooking my garden I also had time to take stock of what I had achieved with my bird-friendly planting over the years, and the birds which had made the Knowler property their own.
As I told the gardeners of Lenah Valley, these Covid times have given the concept of the garden an added emphasis. Although it might have been human-centric in the past as a place to grow flowers, fruit and vegetables, the garden has now also been acknowledged as a home for wildlife.
Even property owners with scant interest in birds started to notice the variety of species on their home turf once their freedom to travel was restricted at the height of the pandemic.
Since the arrival of Covid in early 2020 there has been a concomitant interest in planting flowers and shrubs, and making changes to the design of gardens, to create wildlife-friendly spaces.
In the design of bird-friendly gardens, we must first ask the simple question: what do birds need? Basically, it is food and shelter, along with water.
In the garden itself, a range of trees and shrubs at different heights are vitally important, creating levels of foliage to suit birds that have different foraging requirements, like feeding at ground level, in the under-storey or in the canopy. The bird-lover must also
provide food for the pollen and nectar feeders like honeyeaters and parrots (nectarivores) and fruit and seeds for fruit and seed-eaters (frugivores and granivores). As for insect-eaters (insectivores), a diverse and chemical-free garden will attract insects, which in turn will provide food for birds like superb fairy-wrens and grey fantails.
In truth, most garden birds do not feed exclusively on just one of these food sources. Honeyeaters, for instance, feed insects to their young to provide protein for growing bodies and parrots feed on nectar in spring and seeds and fruit when it becomes available in autumn.
My own thoughts, though, during the Covid spell were not so much about further plantings but the records of sightings I have made over the years.
On my leafy patch not more than three kilometres from the Hobart CBD, I have recorded a remarkable 59 species, including half of Tasmania’s 12 endemic birds. There’s been great joy in hearing yellow-tailed black cockatoos crunching the nuts of my garden’s hakeas during the autumn and, in spring, seeing green rosellas feasting on the nectar-rich flowers of blackwood and silver wattles.