In ten easy steps (and a bonus question), you could be on your way to a having a haven for birds, mammals and insects, all within easy viewing of your kitchen window.

1. Bird feeding station (4 points)
A bird feeding station is a good start for any garden - providing high-energy food for hungry birds throughout the year.
- BBC guide to feeding garden birds.
- RSPB feeding birds guide

2. Long grass (1 point)
Just forget to mow one corner of your garden to allow the grass to grow long. Perfect for crickets, grasshoppers, ants and small mammals such as voles.
- How to make your lawn wildlife friendly
- RSPB Lawns for wildlife

3. Nectar-rich plants (2 points)
Insects such as bumblebees and butterflies need energy too - so treat them, and yourself, to a flowerbed with nectar-rich plants during the spring and summer.
- Plants for a wildlife garden

4. Bird bath (2 points)
Just like us, birds need water - to drink and to bathe. A simple bird bath is easy to buy or make.
- RSPB advice on Bird Baths

5. Compost heap (1 points)
Compost heaps provide just the right temperature for creatures such as worms and invertebrates, which in turn attract birds. You may even be lucky enough to get a slow worm or grass snakes (try these links)

6. Logpile (3 points)
Piles of cut wood are an ideal hideaway for all sorts of insects and other invertebrates, as well as small mammals. And hedgehogs may even hibernate in there through the winter.
- Wild about gardens - making a logpiles

7. Nest boxes (3 points)
Once you've attracted birds to your garden, why not provide them with a ready-made home? You could invest in a nest-cam, so when there's nothing telly you can watch your very own SPRINGWATCH unfold in your back garden. There are plenty to choose from different manufacturers these days.

8. Berry-bearing shrubs (4 points)
Birds love berries - high-energy fruit to help them get through the autumn and winter.
- RSPB Birds and berries guide

9. Pond (5 points)
A wildlife garden needs a pond - even a tiny patch of water will bring birds to drink and bathe, frogs and newts to live, mammals to drink, and insects to feed and breed.
- Pond conservation - making a pond

10. Wild flower meadow (5 points)
If you're really ambitious to make your garden into a wildlife haven, then a wild flower meadow is ideal - hard work, but well worth it! (try these links)
- BBC Breathing Places - sowing wild flowers
- RHS - Wildflower meadows

11. Bonus Points: Get your neighbours involved (5 points)
Animals need large and interconnected green areas, so the more of your neighbours that have wildlife friendly gardens, the better it will be for everyone.
- The benefits of wildlife volunteering in UK

Your score:_____

24-35 points: you are a wildlife star and a fine example for all of us on SPRINGWATCH - your garden will rival anything we have filmed for the series

16-23 points: you are doing a great job attracting wildlife to your garden - keep up the good work.

8-15 points: your garden is already good for wildlife but could be a better - start digging that pond.

1-7 points: the good news is that anything you do will make your garden a lot better for wildlife - and, hopefully, you

General help about wildlife gardening
- Gardening to attract wildlife
- RSPB planning and creating a wildlife-friendly garden
- Scottish Wildlife Trust: In your garden

Editors Note: About Stephen Moss

We're currently putting together the Springwatch Easter Special, which will be broadcast on Easter Monday 25 April, at 8pm on BBC Two. The programme is being recorded this coming Monday at Portland Bill bird observatory on the Dorset coast, one of the first landing-points for migrants returning from the south.

Now we want your help. If you're out and about this weekend we'd love to hear about your sightings - especially any unusual or particularly early ones. Please let us know by posting a comment below. You can also send these in to the Nature's Calendar website - the world's biggest survey of changing seasons.

So hope the good weather keeps up - and look forward to hearing from you!

Stephen Moss is the Producer of the Springwatch Easter Special

Many thanks for all your comments. Please don't comment on this post any more. We'll be posting spring updates on this blog right through the season so please feel free to comment on them instead.]]> Stephen Moss Stephen Moss https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/natureuk/2011/04/springwatch-easter-special-you.shtml https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/natureuk/2011/04/springwatch-easter-special-you.shtml Springwatch Easter Special Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:20:48 +0000 As a child I grew up in that strange 'no-man's land' between city and country, the suburbs of west London. My playground was the scrubby bits of wood, gravel-pits and fields - all largely man-made habitats, yet full of birds.

As a result, the populations of our farmland birds - iconic species such as the skylark, lapwing and yellowhammer - have been in freefall for some time now. Migrants such as the cuckoo are also in trouble, perhaps because of factors beyond our shores, such as climate change in Africa where they spend the winter.

But it's not all bad news - during the same time as our birds have declined, we as a people have learned to love them like no other nation. This final programme in this series celebrates that love and affection through some surprising stories, including the influence of birds on people during the two world wars, the way that two gamebirds have shaped our landscape, and the appearance of the nightingale and skylark in poetry.

Birds Britannia: Countryside Birds is on BBC Four Wednesday 24 November, 9pm (and various dates/times during following week). Watch previous episodes on iPlayer.

Stephen Moss is the Series Producer.

When they do come to land, though, they create one of the most extraordinary of all Britain's wildlife spectacles - described by one contributor to Birds Britannia, Roy Dennis, as "our equivalent of the Serengeti". The sight, sound and of course smell of these vast breeding colonies is quite overpowering - and of all my birding memories, watching seabirds on the Farne Islands, the Shetland island of Noss, and the remote archipelago of St Kilda, are amongst the most vivid.

Yet for most of my life - and I suspect yours, too - I do not generally encounter seabirds. Compared to the subjects of our other episodes - Garden Birds, Waterbirds, and Countryside Birds - they are remote and often forgotten. All, that is, apart from one very special and often overlooked group - the gulls. Gulls are the one group of seabirds which have chosen to invade our space, by living and breeding in our city centres - and we don't always like it.

Our changing relationship with gulls will be revealed in this week's episode of Birds Britannia, along with many other aspects of our ancient and turbulent relationship with seabirds as a whole - from the way we exploited them for food, to how we eventually came to protect them. It is a dramatic, exciting, and largely untold chapter in the history of our rise and fall as a seafaring people.

Birds Britannia: Seabirds is on BBC Four Wednesday 17 November, 9pm (and various dates/times during following week). Watch previous episodes on iPlayer.

Stephen Moss is the Series Producer.

Later on, while out on a school nature walk, I saw my first great crested grebes – surely one of the most beautiful of all our birds. I was hooked on waterbirds – and now, at my new home on the Somerset Levels, am enjoying seeing them on a daily basis.

The great crested grebe has an extraordinary part to play in the history of our long – and often turbulent – relationship with Britain’s birds. We didn’t eat them (unlike most other waterbirds) but during the Victorian era we did persecute them in the name of ladies’ fashions. Their feathers were used on hats, muffs and to trim coats and dresses, and the grebe almost went extinct as a result. Only the intervention of a group of determined ‘posh women’ turned the tide, and saved the grebe forever – and in the process, started off the RSPB!

Later the grebe went on to kick-start two branches of science: ethology, or the study of animal behaviour, which began in 1912 when a young scientist named Julian Huxley observed their amazing breeding behaviour for the first time. Later, in the 1930s, grebes helped start the social science movement Mass-Observation. This was when its founder Tom Harrisson, a keen birder, realised he could apply the same techniques he had used to survey grebes to study the habits of another species – us!

These are just three of the fascinating stories in this week’s Birds Britannia. I’d love to know what you think of the series, so do add your comments below. In the meantime thanks for all the feedback so far…

Birds Britannia: Waterbirds is on BBC Four from Wednesday 10 November, 9pm.

The famous roost at Ham Wall RSPB reserve on the Somerset Levels is now beginning to take shape, with more and more birds joining every evening – and will continue to grow until the New Year, especially if there is a cold snap.

The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust has also reported other arrivals – good numbers of ducks, geese and swans at Slimbridge, and at other WWT sites up and down the country.

Sadly, a gradual fall in numbers of winter visitors such as Bewick's swans and white-fronted geese in the past few years means that we hardly ever get them here in Somerset any more. There used to be a regular flock of wild swans down the road from me, but nowadays they are few and far between. I suspect this is because conditions are staying milder in the Baltic and the Netherlands, where many of these birds pass through on their way here – as a result they are simply staying put.

I did see a pair of whooper swans at Cheddar Reservoir last week. These are the larger, more elegant, and longer billed cousins of the Bewick's swans, with similar bill colour (though the whooper's bill always appears yellow with a bit of black, rather than the predominantly black-with-a-bit-of-yellow of the Bewick's swan).

Wild swans, along with a host of other waterbirds, feature in episode two of Birds Britannia, on BBC Four. (Full schedule.)

The programme tells the dramatic story of bird protection in Britain – and how we almost lost these wonderful birds altogether, before they staged a comeback thanks to enlightened visionaries such as the founder of the WWT, Sir Peter Scott.

And yet our relationship with garden birds is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. It is the result of some of the most dramatic changes in British society in the last hundred and fifty years.

For we are a nation of gardeners, who have become a nation of garden bird-lovers. Our long and cherished relationship with our gardens, as evinced by the huge popularity of television and radio programmes such as Gardeners' World and Gardeners' Question Time, has undoubtedly helped to influence and define our relationship with the birds that live in our gardens.

Today, two out of three of us feed wild birds in our gardens, spending over £150 million pounds a year in the process. In a sense, this simple act of kindness to our fellow creatures is the entry point into a deeper relationship with wildlife as a whole - a symbiotic relationship bringing mutual benefit, whereby the birds are fed, and we are entertained by watching them.

Yet only a century ago, most of us did not even have gardens. We took little interest in the welfare of our feathered neighbours, and were more likely to eat a blackbird than to feed it. And the very concept of ‘garden birds’ was meaningless - the term hadn’t even been invented yet.

So in little more than a century, an extraordinary transformation has taken place in our relationship with the birds that live alongside us. This domestic drama runs parallel to the history and development of that very British phenomenon, the modern suburban garden. Tune in into the first episode of Birds Britannia to find out how!

Birds Britannia: Garden Birds is on BBC Four and iPlayer from Wednesday 3 November. Check all programme times.

Stephen Moss is the Series Producer.

So what better time to think about that classic symbol of the season just gone - butterflies?

All you need to do is write about a memorable encounter you've had with butterflies. It may be your earliest memory, or something that happened this summer - what's important is that you write about what it meant to you.

Meanwhile my red admirals, usually the last butterfly I see in my garden, disappeared about a week ago. In their place I content myself with goldfinches and a great spotted woodpecker on the bird feeder, ravens croaking overhead, and, best of all, a flock of about 15 long-tailed tits which flitted past me on my walk down the back lane this morning.

These gorgeous little birds are one of my favourites, and they always seem to let you get a close-up view as they flit past, uttering their gentle little call. Look out for them in hedgerows, gardens and even car parks - we have a regular flock at the BBC!

Stephen Moss's new series, Birds Britannia, starts on BBC Four on Wednesday 3 November.

But mistle thrushes are quite a scarce bird here on the Somerset Levels, and besides, rarely travel in flocks like these. So I knew even before I lifted my binoculars that they were fieldfares - members of the thrush family which spend the winter in Britain.

They have come from the north and east - Scandinavia, or perhaps even from Arctic Russia. They travel so far for one simple reason: because if they stayed put on their breeding grounds they would undoubtedly starve to death when the winter comes. So just as our swallows head off to warmer climes, so do these - only ours are the warmer climes they come to.

On Saturday morning, just before dawn, I heard the tell-tale sound of the fieldfare's smaller and more delicate cousin, the redwing - a high-pitched 'seeep' as the bird passed unseen overhead. Later that day I managed to see them too: a small flock of redwings, shaped rather like starlings but with a subtly different 'feel' to their appearance, heading south over my home.

So, I reasoned, autumn is here, and winter can't be far behind. Soon there will be thousands of these delightful thrushes thronging the hedgerows of mine and many other rural parishes in Britain. If we get a winter like last one, they'll even head into gardens in search of food. Last winter, during that freezing cold spell in January, this website and the BTO were inundated with reports of 'strange birds' in gardens - some people even identified fieldfares as cuckoos, which isn't as silly as it sounds, as both are large, grey and with a hefty bill!

Autumn may be here, but on Saturday, just after I saw the redwings, summer had its very last fling. Half a dozen swallows, surely the tail-end of the migration south, passed over my garden, heading in a south-easterly direction towards mainland Europe. As I waved them goodbye, I felt both a pang of regret at their absence for the next few months, and a sense of excitement at the coming of autumn - one of my very favourite seasons for watching birds.

Have you seen any redwings and fieldfares yet? If so do let us know!

Stephen Moss is a series producer at the BBC Natural History Unit and author, with a special interest in British wildlife. His latest series, Birds Britannia, will be shown on BBC Four from Wednesday 3 November.

This unique relationship between the British and our birds reveals as much about us as it does about the birds themselves. As a lifelong birder, I have long been fascinated by the incredible stories of how birds have influenced our lives - both individually and in terms of our nation's history.

Stories featured in the series include:

• The amazing saga of how blue tits learned to break into milk bottles by pecking through the foil tops to get at the cream - and why they eventually stopped doing so...
• How a group of 'posh women' in 19th century Manchester managed to stop the grisly trade in bird plumage and skins, and in doing so changed the face of bird protection forever...
• How the 'bird people' of the remote island group of St Kilda lived almost entirely on birds for hundreds of years, right up to their final evacuation in 1930...
• How, during the Second World War, birds were seen as a symbol of the Britain we were fighting for; evoked in wartime propaganda films and through the amazing studies of birds by British prisoners-of-war...

The series doesn't have a presenter, but is narrated by the wonderful Scottish actor Bill Paterson, whose voice perfectly captures the drama, humour and excitement of the stories we are telling. We have also interviewed a wide range of experts and bird enthusiasts, including David Attenborough, Mark Cocker, Jeremy Mynott, Tim Birkhead, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, Christopher Frayling, Kate Humble, Rob Lambert, Desmond Morris, David Lindo, Helen Macdonald, Andrew Motion, Tony Soper, and of course our very own incomparable birdman Bill Oddie. They have all given us incredible insights into the nature of this very special relationship between the British and their birds.

Birds Britannia tells of how, for centuries, we regarded birds purely as objects to be used for our benefit - for food and fuel, sport and recreation. And how gradually, over time, we came to value them, cherish them, and finally to understand what they truly mean to us. I hope you enjoy it - and look forward to reading your thoughts and comments here on the blog...

EPISODES:
Wednesday 3 November: Garden Birds
Wednesday 10 November: Waterbirds
Wednesday 17 November: Seabirds
Wednesday 24 November: Countryside Birds

Stephen Moss is a series producer at the BBC Natural History Unit and author, with a special interest in British wildlife.

So imagine my surprise when, earlier this week, I was driving back into my village when I noticed birds swooping low over the rhyne (Somerset word for water-filled ditch) next to the road. Surely they couldn't be... but they were! More than 60 swallows: busily feeding on tiny insects while their backs were warmed by the autumn sun.

As they moved on, so did I; but there they were again, this time perched on a pair of telegraph wires like notes on a musical stave (I know that's a cliché but that's what they look like...) I took a closer look: most were juvenile birds, with short, stubby tails, rather than the long, elegant plumes of the adults. There was also a single house martin amongst them, looking slightly confused, as well he might.

Given the fact that the village swallows headed off almost a month ago, and that we have had strong easterly winds all week, I suspect that this particular flock of swallows came from Scandinavia. Having travelled across the North Sea they were busy refuelling in a Somerset field, before flying away to the south.

From here they will pass over the south coast, cross the Channel, and then journey right across Europe, over the Mediterranean Sea (probably via Gibraltar to avoid a long sea crossing), then fly across the desert and down into sub-Saharan Africa. Having spent our winter flying around the legs of elephants and other big game of the African savannah, they will finally head back north to breed - often returning to the very same place where they were born.

It's another cliché to talk about the miracle of migration - but when I see birds like these swallows, or the wheatear which dropped in one morning a few weeks ago, I really am filled with a mixture of joy and admiration. In a world where we take global air travel for granted, we should all take a moment to acknowledge the extraordinary journeys of these delightful little birds.

Stephen Moss is a series producer at the BBC Natural History Unit and author, with a special interest in British wildlife. His latest series, Birds Britannia, will be shown on BBC Four from Monday 1 November.