How to Look After Wildlife During Wintertime

As winter settles in, temperatures drop, which unfortunately leaves many wildlife species to overcome the harshness of freezing weather on a limited amount of food supply, making it difficult for birds to find natural foods during the cold season. Therefore, any extra food you put out would be a great bonus for them.

What You Can Do to Help

You can provide various foods, from cheese and apples to pears and seeds. Particularly beneficial for birds’ fat reserves are sunflower hearts and unsalted peanuts.

If you have a pond in your garden and it freezes over the wintertime, you should consider making a hole in the ice. Otherwise, any fish or frogs at the bottom might perish because of the poisonous gases that can accumulate. However, you need to be extra careful when doing so and not break the ice with force or pour boiling water on top. Instead, you can position a pan filled with boiling water over the surface. Or you can float a tiny ball to prevent it from freezing in the first place.

Save Garden Tidying Until the Spring

During the cold month’s insects will find your garden extremely attractive and nestle in pleasant and cosy homes to hibernate. Wasps and ladybugs usually find shelter in cracks of window frames and doors or under loose bark. Butterflies will seek warmth in your garage or shed or among your curtain folds. And bumblebees especially like hiding in the ground or leaf piles. To support your winter visitors, you can tie up bamboo and sunflower stems and place them in a dry location of your garden or by soaking up a sponge with half water, half sugar to supply a source of feed.

Sadly, only half of hedgehog youngsters survive through their first encounter with winter due to limited food stock or they were unfortunate to be born late-summer. Sometimes during warmer days, hedgehogs might consider it as an invitation to step outside their shelter and waste precious fat supplies searching for food. What you can do to help these cute creatures of nature is build them a leaf shelter or even better-spend a weekend with your family or friends and build a lovely hedgehog house. You can also put out a bowl of fresh water now and again and a dish of cat or dog food.

Want to make your garden more wildlife-friendly? Call our design team today on 0116 210 0760.