What's Going on With the Wildlife in Your Garden?

As gardeners, it is easy to lose sight of exactly how much we have achieved over the years—and also so easy to focus on the things that go wrong rather than looking at the many things that go right. 

One major measure of all we may be doing right in our gardens is biodiversity. As organic gardeners, we should be trying to boost biodiversity through the plants we grow, how we combine them, and the strategies we use to welcome a range of wildlife into our gardens. 

But all too often, we may not be aware of what wildlife is actually sharing our space. We may not immediately be able to tell whether or not we have been successful in our efforts to boost biodiversity where we live. 

Being able to monitor the wildlife in your garden, and taking small, simple steps that allow us to measure our successes in attracting certain species, boosting species numbers, and, most crucially, increasing the number of beneficial interactions within the system can make a big difference. 

Collecting data and monitoring the life around us can boost our confidence as gardeners, helping us to see empirically that we are on the right track. It can help us see where we are doing really well, and also where there may still be improvements to be made. 

How to Monitor Wildlife in Your Garden Over Time

The first and simplest way to monitor the wildlife in your garden is simply through your own basic powers of observation. We may often note to ourselves, for example, that we have seen more of particular bird species after we planted specific native plants, or added a particular feature to our gardens. 

But monitoring wildlife in more rigorous and slightly more scientific ways can allow us to make sure that there is veracity in our observations. In other words, it can help us make sure we don't just think that there are more birds (using the example above) but that there actually are. 

We do not have to be scientists ourselves to engage in a little citizen science and doing simple tasks like counting and identifying species is something everyone in a family can learn how to do. 

Of course, there are plenty of times in a garden when we cannot monitor wildlife with our eyes and other senses—times we are not around when a lot of wildlife is likely to be active. This is where devices like wildlife cameras can come in. There are plenty of suitable cameras, expensive and far less so, on the market. We might also place footprint tunnels that record which species have walked over them.

Monitoring wildlife does not necessarily just mean counting species and numbers present. But these are easy-to-gather data points that we can all potentially use to better understand the wildlife present in our outside spaces and how its variety and composition might be changing over time. 

We can begin by making sure that we recognize and can identify each and every creature that we see when we are spending time in our gardens, looking through camera footage, or assessing footprint tunnels. 

After making sure that we know which visible species are present, we can count how many we see over a given time period—the course of a couple of hours, or a day, for example. 

What Does 'Success' Look Like?

So, we have gathered some data that can help us to better understand the state of biodiversity in our gardens. But that only takes us part way. 

We also need to consider how we can learn from that data, and once we have drawn our conclusions, ascertain whether we have been successful when it comes to welcoming wildlife and boosting biodiversity. 

We need to take a look at the data—for example, perhaps there are more of a particular bird species present—and look at it in the broader context.

It may not always be possible to definitively say that one particular addition or one particular strategy employed has resulted in this positive change. But often, we can make educated guesses and become more in tune with the natural environment within which and with which we are working. 

Whether we measure successes in terms of the numbers of a particular species, the number of species in total, or by other metrics, monitoring wildlife in our gardens is often the first step on the road to success and to measuring those successes moving forwards.