Wildlife garden update - it’s working!

At the end of 2025, I started my wildlife garden project and since my first post, I have made some more changes and have had some amazing success with some new species coming into the garden, as well as upgrading my photography perches.

So some of the biggest changes I have made are adding some woodpecker posts, now these I have scavenged from the local wood (huge thanks to Tim for carrying that beast back for me), and the garden. These I have (rightly or wrongly) dug into the ground and then drilled some holes in, that I can push some suet into to attract in the woodpeckers, but also some of the smaller birds and I also filled some of the natural holes in the branches as well.

The second big change we made, was to use the cuttings from the old sycamore and make a bit of a dead hedge in a gap in the fence, which will 1 please the farmer who I know doesn’t like the gap, 2 help to tidy up the background if I photograph in that direction, and 3 hopefully give some cover for the smaller birds. I need to thank Tim again for this as he built the whole hedge himself, and it looks amazing! I am hoping that this area will attract some creeping vines, that will in time give more cover and a more pleasant background for my images.

Building the dead hedge also tidied up an area of the garden that, very much, needed tidying, now a lot of the branches had gone, it meant that I could access the rest of the logs and old posts much more easily and tidy it up even more. Though my lens is f6.3 at 600mm, I generally shoot at about f8, to sharpen the image up a bit from being wide open, but also, the Sony 200-600 does have a fair bit of vignetting at the lower f-stop. By tidying up this area as much as possible, I was able to still get a pretty decent bokeh and blurred background behind my new bird bath.

This was a gift from one of my sisters for my birthday, and upon assembling it and placing it in the garden, I found some large flat stones that I could place in it, to hopefully encourage the birds onto them, and also found some moss to put around the back of them to get that, nature feel to the images I hope to create with it. I am also going to dress the front of the bird bath in this way, but need to get some more moss that isn’t as thick as the stuff I have put on around the back where the stones are. I have yet to see any birds use the bath, but as it is still early March, and we are getting frosts overnight still, I don’t blame them for not wanting to take the plunge into the cold waters!

The final addition to the garden set up was some smaller perches, that I acquired from the woods. This took a bit of fiddling to really get them sorted, and I ended up attaching one directly above the bird feeder, and one to a pole that Tim found and set into the ground for me (again, thanks to Tim here for this idea).

Now that the changes have been implemented, it was time to see what, if anything would use my new garden additions and if I could photograph them!

I set up my new chair hide that I got for Christmas, I wouldn’t generally use this just in the garden, but having had quick glimpses of woodpeckers in the garden, they were very flighty and did not stay around long, so thought that this would be my best chance of getting the to come in to land and feed on my perches and logs.

I set the hide up the day before, so that the birds could get used to this new addition. I was up early the following morning, at 6:30am, to a stunning but cold day (it was -2°c!), there was a hard frost and even my hide was frosted on the inside! But I hoped that his meant that the birds would be hungry after a night in the cold.

I got myself set up, and didn’t have to wait long until the birds started coming in, including a female Great Spotted Woodpecker! This was amazing to see and my first proper chance to see one in the garden and not just flying away! She came in and landed on the cherry tree, so I made sure not to make any sudden movements that could scare her off, she then flew onto one of my pecker posts, and I was able to get some lovely images and video footage of her, before she headed off. This was a very memorable experience and cemented in my mind, how lucky I am to live in a rural area, and have these beautiful animals in my garden.

As the morning went on, there were lots of Blue and Great Tits, Robins, Blackbirds and a new addition in the form of a pair of Chaffinch. This pair were quite taken with one of my pecker posts, as I had drilled and filled some holes with suet lower down on the back side of some of the branches where they could easily feed from.

The sun was starting to cause me some issues as it rose, lighting up the field behind the house and my perches, but leaving my garden in shade. So at 8:30am, I headed in to warm up and for some much-needed breakfast.

I headed back out to the garden hide about 3pm, the cloud cover had come in a bit which was ideal for me as there was now even lighting all around. In my morning session, there was not much action on the new perches I had put out, so I was hoping that this afternoon that would change, and thankfully it did, and I was able to get some lovely images of some Blue Tits, using the perches.

While the Woodpecker in my morning session was definitely a highlight, my main goal was to get some good images of the Long-tailed Tits, which have been a goal of mine since seeing them briefly in my first garden session back in January. They had come in earlier, but went straight onto the feeders and when on my perches I was not fast enough to any images. When they came in, to start with they just sat and preened in the hawthorn tree, so I made sure to capture some images of them here, just in case! Then I got my camera set on one of my perches, and waited for them to hopefully hop on to it. It took a while of waiting, but eventually, this paid off, and I had a split second, to get my images of these stunning birds before they moved on.

I am so happy with the images that I got from this garden session, and it is brilliant to see more birds and some new species in the garden after my changes. There is still a lot of work I can go to perfect this garden set up, and coming into Spring, I am super excited to see what I can create and more importantly welcome into the garden.