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With so many people reporting sightings of unusual birds in their gardens - and observing some pretty odd behaviour - I'm struggling to entice anything other than pigeons to my plot. I don't know if I should even take part in this year's RSPB Big

the wiser.I only get pigeons regularly visiting my garden. Last winter I made efforts to entice smaller, hungrier birds, and managed to attract a desperate pair of wagtails, a blackbird, a robin and a blue tit. They disappeared as soon as the ice thawed

This time last year I was bemoaning the lack of birds in my garden. There was little point in taking part in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, as the only feathered visitors to my plot were pigeons (although a robin, blackbird and a pair of grey

While the growling frogs in my mum's shallow pond have gone quiet (“and who can blame them, the pond completely froze over last week”, observed my mother), a pair of robins has been busy in the garden of my mother-in-law. Despite the bad weather

You might see your garden as an isolated entity, but the local hedgehogs, frogs, birds and bees view it differently. As long as there are holes under fences for animals to get from one garden to the next, yours is just one piece in the varied jigsaw

It's easy to consider bees and birds when gardening – we see plenty of them if we grow the right plants – but what about bats? Emerging from their roosts at dusk and returning by dawn, they can often go unnoticed.My partner is a huge fan of bats

Last winter, when I went to great trouble to feed the birds in my garden, my offerings were largely ignored. This winter, I'm trying again, leaving seeds, chopped apples and suet pellets for ground-feeding birds such as robins, blackbirds

by rats, voles and garden birds. (Findings were published in BBC Wildlife Magazine and you can listen to the author of the report discussing them here.) How much cats actually affect local wildlife populations remains unclear.In their heyday, my mum’s (now

skips for more wood and was experimenting with designs for robins, wrens and starlings. In the wild, birds nest in a variety of situations such as holes in trees and hedgerows, which tend not to be that abundant in gardens. A snug box with an appropriate

, which was a gift from Sid the blackbird. But they’re a long way off flowering and fruiting. Only the honeysuckle has a supply of berries, which isn’t much to sustain local birds.Small, manageable options for my garden include hawthorn, pyracantha