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My two compost bins are being very productive. As well as yielding their first crop of usable compost, now spread over back and front gardens to great effect, they are also home to a heaving mass of wildlife. Every time I open the lids a great cloud

We have a bumblebee nest in our compost bin. I first noticed a month ago when the first few workers started coming and going. Now we have a steady stream. The bees are buff-tailed, Bombus terrestris, one of our commonest species.I've told the family

There's a spider the size of a gardening glove in my compost bin. It obviously gets a good living in there, feeding on the flies, woodlice, beetles and earwigs, the remains of which can be vaguely guessed in its untidy sheet of a web. I wouldn

What's the point of having a compost heap unless it's to breed fruit flies. That's the way my entomologist's mind works. During the summer great clouds of them billowed up every time I dumped the kitchen waste. They got in my eyes and hair

into the compost bin. Even here, though, there is not much about at the moment. A couple of woodlice clamp down hard to the wooden rim and there's the remains of a hoverfly puparium (chrysalis) wedged into a crevice outside. Like most wildlife out there

have none of these, but we do have plenty of straggly bits of long grass, clematis and ivy thickets you could hide a giant panda in, and an unexplored jungle, alive with distant roars, behind the compost bins.I sometimes feel uneasy when I see a garden

, using railway sleepers, three high (about 50 cm), to make a raised water body. Triangular in shape, 2 metres long, with a deep corner dug down a further 50 cm and a shallow corner for marginal plants. Three species of damselfly, two species of dragonfly

I have cats. Every so often I have to live with the guilt that they kill the local wildlife. It's usually one of the mice breeding in the compost heaps or a blue-tit fledgling. The main hunter is the black and white one; lovely and soft and over

At 11 o'clock in the morning, the bowl of Bob-the-Builder pasta shapes was either a late second breakfast, or an early first lunch - whatever, it was interrupted by the announcement from nearly-three-year-old: "Look, there's a magpie". Sure enough

small critters come to warm themselves. And what's this? The compost bin has started to leak fruit flies; the perfect snack for a hungry spider.