Supporting Wildlife in the Garden - an interview with Donna Mullen

Supporting Wildlife in the Garden - an interview with Donna Mullen

Whether you have a large garden or a modest balcony, what better person to speak to about making your space more wildlife and nature-friendly than someone who's just written a book about the subject?

Donna Mullen is an ecologist of some 30 years, a founder member of Bat Conservation Ireland and the Irish Environmental Network, and director of Wildlife Surveys Ireland. Last year her first book Make Your Home a Nature Reserve was published by O'Brien Press. 

Make Your Home a Nature Reserve

Make Your Home a Nature Reserve - Donna Mullen

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She had plenty of real world research to draw upon. A little over 20 years ago she (along with her husband Brian) bought a 43 acre farm in Golashane, Co. Meath, at which point it consisted of intensive grassland with little to no biodiversity. It is now a place where wildlife thrives, with newts, buzzards, jays, woodcock and grasshopper warblers all calling it home. 

The landscape was steadily transformed by planting new hedgerows, native woodland, heritage Irish apple trees and an acre of wildflower meadow, as well as with other methods like sowing 7½ acres of bird seed crop or providing pond habitat. Another cornerstone of their approach was focusing on one wildlife species a year (more on that tactic below!). 

Overall it's an inspiring example of what can happen when we give nature space to bounce back. Golashane Farm has received an EU Rural Inspiration Award and frequently hosts farm walks, as well as the Moynalty Goes Wild sustainability festival.

An important takeaway is that the practices and methods used at Golashane Farm are replicable on a smaller scale. To this end, Make Your Home a Nature Reserve is an accessible guide to attracting and supporting wildlife, with practical exercises, advice and all kinds of interesting info about creatures and their habits (or habitats!) It was a joy talking to her, so here is the interview below. 

We start with the subject of the book itself:

"It was really just something to do. My sister has a bookshop in Meath so I thought ‘ah sure, I’ll write this and self-publish it and sell 50 copies or whatever', and then as lockdown continued the book got longer and longer. 

I tried to choose unpopular animals and common animals. Obviously biodiversity everywhere is collapsing, but even with the common animals there’s less of them, less numbers of them. I'm terribly impatient, so I just wanted something that would be quick and easy and you'd get instant results, like bringing in blue tits for example. 

My kitchen is full of recipe books, mostly of things that I don't cook! But you know the way with a recipe book there’s usually a little story about the dish, then there's ingredients and then there's how you cook it. I kind of thought, ‘why has nobody done this for wildlife?’ So it's a bit about the wildlife, and then what you need - your ingredients to bring that wildlife in. And then how to go about it. 

I’ve been writing stories since I was about 6, so it was a miracle when O’Brien Press decided that they’d actually publish it and get it on the shelves everywhere. I’m thrilled! It’s the first time I’ve written a book, I have had other things published in the Village magazine and then lots of nature journals and things. 

In the book there are lots of practical exercises for children. Do you find that children are very receptive to wildlife and nature and so on? 

The great thing about nature is that it’s free, and there’s just so much that you can do out there. Even when it was snowing last week - we didn’t have the kids with us, just as adults ourselves we went out looking at tracks in the snow and trying to figure out what they might be. We found a new route that a hare takes that we didn’t know before, just by following the tracks. There’s so much that you can do, it doesn’t cost any money and it gets kids outdoors.

Everybody loves hunting for something, trying to find a particular bird or a beetle. And a lot of the time you’re finding things that are rare enough (or at least that we didn’t know were there) and logging them with Biodiversity Ireland. There's the Citizen Science Portal and you can have it logged for evermore in a database with your name.

What would be the most recent arrival of a species on the nature reserve that you’ve noticed or logged? 

We're very excited that just last week we had the hare. We actually had a pet rabbit that used to live in our front garden and used to battle with all the wild rabbits. You’d drive in and there’d be murder going on. We had to nearly have a barricade at the gate to keep the rabbits from killing each other. There were torn ears and pierced noses and so on! 

And then we went out one day and our rabbit was dead. And within a month all the rabbits were dead, and the hares were gone. Rabbit hemorrhagic disease obviously hit. We haven't had any rabbits or hares in four years and this is the first hare that we've got back now. So it's great to see that something's coming back. And we also had a barn owl around in just the last couple of days, so that was very exciting. We have them just rarely, now and again; and we have some barn owl boxes up. 

Was that a disease all over Ireland or was it just kind of localised? 

Yeah, it was all over Ireland. But I know here it's localised to our area of Meath because when I was around the Boyne Valley I was seeing lots of rabbits, so it obviously hasn't hit that area yet. But there were hundreds of rabbits. The loss of all those rabbits has a huge knock on impact for the foxes and the buzzards and anything that would have been living off them. 

And it shows as well, I suppose, to log everything, even the common things. I never logged the rabbits on Biodiversity Ireland. You see something red-listed, such as the barn owl - I put him in. I didn't log that there were 50 rabbits all fighting by the gate every day. And now there's none, you know. 

Is it a bit of a challenge sometimes balancing all the different species? Or would there be conflicts? 

Yeah. Well, I mean, I absolutely love all animals. We have every kind of pet and every kind of animal living here. But there is a challenge. 

We saw a pine marten on the trail camera and thought ‘oh, wonderful! that's new.’ And then a week later, she killed all our hens, so that was kind of a disaster. But then the pine marten came a couple of days later and she had two little kits with her and they were just adorable. She's only looking for food for her kids. 

So we built a chicken pen that has a roof on it and an electric fence around it, and it has a little skirt of netting at the bottom. There are commercially available ones, called Eglu’s: we have some in that, and we have others in another pen. And we've never had a problem with the pine marten again. So it's up to us really to protect what we want protected. They're only looking for food! 

The reason I first came across your name was because I wanted to just find out a little bit about hedgehogs. They're in decline everywhere it seems. I don't know if they're officially in decline in Ireland, but anecdotally, people say that you just don't see them anymore around the place. And I was just wondering are there things that the average household or gardener can do for the hedgehog. I've seen hedgehog houses that you can buy. Would they be any use really? 

Well I've tried out everything on my own farm…I've tried out hedgehog houses that I bought, and they never seem to work. So it's just things like piles of stones or leaving gaps under your shed, as well as natural habitats like piles of branches. 

But obviously just leaving long patches of grass, and leaving little gaps between your garden and the next door neighbour's garden. I think it's only 30 mm gaps that they need. You can get pretty decorations that say ‘hedgehog highway’ so it doesn't just look like there's a hole in your fence; that you're doing this on purpose. 

hedgehog access hole

Particularly as well on a big scale: when there are housing developments going up or parks that tend to have big walls between them as a boundary. Again, to just leave little gaps. I was working with a power station where they were really putting effort into wildlife protection, and one of the main things I was asking them to do was leave very tiny holes in their fences so that animals could get in and out - while still keeping it secure so that people wouldn't be able to get in. 

In my area, there's a lot of silage making. And for the farmers, we ask them if they can start their silage making in the centre of the field rather than...you know, the normal way to do anything is that you start around the edge and you work clockwise. But then any animals that do run get stuck in the middle patch, and then get mown down. So to start in the middle and work outwards is a great way to do it. 

We also recommend that when they have old bales of silage that they're never going to use or they've kind of gone rotten - if they leave a little hole in them, hedgehogs can hibernate in there. 

And Golashane is an official release site for hedgehogs? 

We were, yeah, we had taken some in from the hedgehog hospital in Rush and from the Kildare Wildlife Foundation. So over the course of about 10 years we had a lot of hedgehogs, but then the big snow of 2010 killed them all off, and we hardly had any. 

So then we kind of had a little niche, where we were taking them in and fattening them up. You have to get them over 600 grams before they'll survive the winter. Often if a hedgehog has a second litter, the young aren't fat enough to get through the winter. So yeah, they came to us, and we released quite a few; but we're not releasing any more because we rarely saw them again. 

In the interim we’ve put in loads of extra hedgerow, we've done a lot for hedgehogs around here - but they just don't seem to be thriving. We don't know why. 

They disappear? 

Yeah, we just don't see them again. And we have trail cameras up all over the place. Now and again you’ll see a footprint, or all the neighbours let us know when they see a hedgehog. Hedgehogs are an animal that everybody likes, so people tend to look out for them! So they could just be out of sight…but the numbers across Europe have crashed by about 30 percent, so the IUCN have gotten quite worried about it. They're listing it now as near threatened, so that's a bit of a disaster. 

How does the monitoring on the reserve work? Like with say, the grasshopper warbler, I imagine they can be quite hard to spot. 

Well, thankfully - I'm not great on birds - but my husband is crazy into them. So he does all the monitoring of what's around. 

When we bought the farm, it was just three big fields of grass. So we tried to put in a bit of each habitat. We had 43 acres. The first thing we put in was a forest and now, unfortunately, a lot of that has ash dieback. So we have to make the horrible decision about whether to let it all die and be a deadwood thing and underplant it, or whether to rip it all out and start again. 

As well as the forest we put in some biomass willow. We have about eight acres of scrub, 15 acres of forestry, and then we have grassland. So there's kind of a bit of everything. And quite a big pond! The ponds are fairly addictive. Once you start one pond, every year you want to put in another. And then just different patches of woodland all over the place. Ideally, every corner we'd have a little patch of woodland. 

sunken garden pond

EasyPond 4500 Sunken Garden Pond Kit - 5m x 4m

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Is there an orchard as well? 

Yeah, we've a couple of orchards; we just planted the third orchard this year. Now where we live is very high up, so we hardly get any fruit from the trees. But we put in the first orchard about 15 years ago and then fenced it off. At this time we had hens in it. We put in lots of fruit trees, and then we took the hens out and the whole place has become quite overgrown. It's about a quarter acre that's completely overgrown. And I noticed that Isabella Tree, who does the wilding at Knepp farm, has been doing this - just completely fencing off areas, putting in a few trees to start it off and then leaving it alone. 

It's amazing, it's just full of birds. We have jays coming to the farm that we never had before. I've been kind of asking councils about doing something similar to this in parks. 

There are the rewilding purists who say that you should just fence off a bit and do nothing, and see what happens with nature. We did a bit of that when we came to the farm, and last year after over 23 years on the farm we had some blackberry bramble in it. So I just grew impatient and said ‘oh feck this, put in some trees’. You’d want to have a lot of time to go the complete ‘hands off’ rewilding route, especially when a lot of intensive stuff has taken place and there's nothing that can naturally reforest. 

What kind of tips would you give people about making their garden more wildlife friendly? 

The whole thing can get a bit overwhelming to start, so I would always say: just pick one animal a year, and go all out for that animal. So you could go for blue tits as a great place to start. What you need for that is a feeder with nuts in it. Stick that out in the front garden. You don't want the food and their homes to be close together, so then put some bird boxes in the back garden. 

Woodcrete bird nesting box

Schwegler 2GR Nest Box - 3 x27mm hole

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What I found fascinating was that I'd put out a few bird boxes, but they'd only use one. I was thinking ‘Ah! bit of a waste', but apparently the male shows the female all these boxes and then she chooses him based on how many homes he has: how can he provide for her? So by having a couple of boxes up there, it's actually improving the male's chances. 

And then as regards feeding them as well…with most birds, even the seed-eating birds, the chicks have to eat insects. A little patch of nettles will bring you caterpillars, which blue tits like to eat. So out the back, somewhere near the box, just have a patch of nettles and/or long grass and overgrown stuff that the insects can live in. 

Also, the female lays about 12 eggs - which is just an enormous strain on her body calcium-wise. So if you have some old eggshells, you just crush them up. And you have to bake them so you don't give Salmonella to the other birds. Just put them at the edge of your oven when you're cooking something else, and then put them out on the bird table and that's almost like a vitamin tablet for her, she'll be able to eat that.

I've read a few extracts from the book, and it's just fascinating the way every animal has their own little habits or customs. And they're not that different from us. 

That's it. Absolutely, yeah. 

Bats are my main thing. So I'm always keen to get them ‘into places’. And one of the main problems for bats, and for a lot of animals, is light pollution. I always say if I had diplomatic immunity, or if I were allowed to commit any crime and get away with it, I'd get a pellet gun and start smashing lights all over the place! 

It's really a disaster and we're seeing it more and more. Especially the rarer bats, they can't cope with lights at all. There’s the saying ‘blind as a bat’, but they actually have very big eyes and they're very sensitive to light. So when I'm doing school talks, I try to get kids to go around at night time and just measure the lux levels around their place (you can download a lux meter on your phone) and try and see if there any ‘dark sky’ routes. Is there anywhere they can go to get from a hedgerow to another hedgerow - or a hedgerow to a waterway - where it's less than three lux, which is reasonably dark? 

In France they're really against light pollution; from a human health perspective as well because it affects your sleep patterns. There's a town I go to in France called Tarnos. It's a very industrial town, a working class town with lots of factories. And they have these lovely signs everywhere that say ‘dark sky area’, and that lights will be switched off at 11pm and they don't come back on until 6am. 

What you want is that there are lights where you need them; so lights that are maybe lighting up a pathway. The greenway that goes through Bushy Park in Dublin, that’s fantastically well lit. There are sensor lights, so when you're on your bicycle or you walk through, the light comes on - and it just goes onto the greenway, it doesn't spill off into the sky. Around this greenway there are Daubenton's Bats living in the trees, and they are really intolerant of light. But no problem, they put up with all this - so it can be done properly! 

But I mean you're talking to a woman here who...it's the end of January, I've still got all my Christmas decorations up on the tree with the lights! So it's just finding a way to have your outdoor lights, but only put them on when you're out there - don't leave them on all the time. 

The Schwegler Woodcrete boxes are the ones that Pipistrelle bats love. I actually had a bat try and get into the box while I was nailing it to the tree. And we've tried many times to replicate a homemade version of this Woodcrete mixture, which actually did work, but then they fell apart in the rain. Timber ones work well as well, but they have a lifespan of a couple of years. 

Schwegler woodcrete bat box

Schwegler Flat Woodcrete Bat Box - 1FF

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I have one of the Schweglers up just above my office here, one of the flat boxes, with three bats - we call them the boy band. They are in there and they sing to the females for months and months, right up until the depths of winter, every night. There must have been a bust up because at one point one of them left - there were only two there for about a month. And then the third one came back again! So the bat boxes are great. 

The only thing is people sometimes think that bat boxes might replace a maternity roost, and they won't. What they're great for is hibernating, or the male bats or non-breeding females. I like to say, it's grand student accommodation. Living in ‘bedsits’ is all grand until you have a child, and then you want comfort and you want a bit of security. 

They want 30 degrees ( for a maternity roost), which is just really hot. I bought one of those thermometers and I was thinking, 'how can fascia boards and attics get to 30 degrees?' But you put the thermometer beam on the fascia boards and you’re getting 29, 30 degrees. You can’t replicate that in a bat box. We've tried plug-in bat boxes. We have a big barn at the back here and we try everything out. That's the Holy Grail if there are any budding young scientists!

How did they manage it in the wild then? 

They use hollows in trees. I think as well with the ash dieback, there are a lot more crevices in trees. I'm finding bats using trees more than I've ever found before. Some of them use stone...old stone, bridges and caves and stuff like that. Obviously it's easier for them in hotter countries! 

But if you do have them in your house, they don't cause any harm. They don't bring in bedding. Unless you've got a huge roost, you won't notice the droppings. The only thing is to cover your water tank. It’s good anyway to cover the water tank, or various things would be falling in! 

(More info on Bats can be found here - Daniel)

How has Golashane nature reserve influenced the wider community? Have you had community groups or farmers taking on some of the methods? 

Yeah, and I think it's great. When we moved here 25 years ago, we were looked at, I suppose, as kind of crazy but harmless! But we live in a great place. Anything that you want to do here, the community supports you. I live near Bailieborough, and that's the place where the elderly man wanted to fly an airplane when he was 75 or 80. And the neighbours all built him a runway! It's that kind of place. If you have something that you want to do, everybody will muck in. The neighbours all came out to help us build an artificial badger sett, even though they don't like badgers or they might be afraid of TB or whatever. 

But I'm finding now that there are a lot more farmers giving aside some of their lands for biodiversity. Or passing on their farms to the younger generations who are kind of keen to bring nature into their farms. So it has been a turnaround. 

But yet it can be isolating. For example even when you’re letting your grass grow long, the neighbours will kind of say, ‘are you alright, do you want us to cut your garden’? The relatives are wondering if you’re falling into squalor or what's happening! So I think signage actually is a very important thing, to put up a sign saying what you’re doing. You can download them from the Pollinator Plan website, or get local kids to make them - for example ‘butterfly conservation area’ or ‘growing for bees’.

Would there be any misconceptions about that approach that you'd like to kind of ‘debunk’? 

Well I think the whole thing about badgers spreading TB really drives me crazy, when you look at the science. There were two studies done in Ireland; one was by a friend of mine, Enda Mullen, she’s a wildlife ranger and she did a study with Trinity College. They put collars on badgers in Wicklow and followed them, to see where were they going. 

In order to pass TB into the lungs of the cow, they have to come within a meter and a half of a cow. They have to be close enough to breathe into each other's lungs, more or less. So they mapped the badgers all around the place and the badgers didn't go into the cattle sheds, didn't go into fields with cows in them, didn't go near the water drinkers. So they weren’t passing it. 

They had one badger in the whole lot - they called her Violet, they have names on all the badgers. So Violet went into a shed that had horses in it. They went to have a look, and apparently the owner - when she was feeding the horses - used to spill a bit of feed on the ground, and the badgers were coming to eat the feed. So I mean, the recommendation was just that the badger will come somewhere for food; but they're not going anywhere to breathe at your cattle, or at least it’s not getting transmitted that way.

And then there was another research study done in the north of Ireland by Declan O'Mahony. He put collars on the cattle and collars on the badgers, and whenever they came within a meter of each other, they’d ping. So he got 350,000 pings of cattle to cattle - they're very sociable animals - and eleven and a half thousand pings of badger to badger. But not a single ping of badger and cow. 

So it's not that it's impossible that it could happen: of course it could happen, but it's very unlikely. They talk about vaccinating the badgers, which will certainly help the badgers because the badgers are getting TB! But I don't know what the problem is with TB and cattle. It's kind of scapegoating the badgers. And they killed 100,000 of them, which is a lot. 

I've seen that they often get scapegoated for hedgehog decline as well. 

Yeah and I'm sure they would kill a hedgehog if they come across it, you know...but dogs kill them a lot too. Hedgehogs, they really are so defenceless. Cars kill more hedgehogs, I'd say, than anything. You see them on the road all the time. So it's just lots of little things that are kind of building up to make the biodiversity collapse in any animal.

Is it tough to stay optimistic about everything with the way the world is going? 

Yeah, well I think I'm optimistic by nature anyway (laughs) or I wouldn’t be trying all this in the first place. And I just think we have to try and get away from ‘we'll only save the pretty animals’. You know, we’ll save the tiger that's hassling some other people in some other place, or the panda. But if it happens to be the Kerry slug and it might be holding up a motorway…or a bat that might be a little bit of a hassle, that's coming into your attic in the summertime - and it's not a pretty looking animal! I think we've got to really change our perceptions about whatever our poster animals might be. 

And I think that is changing, actually. Certainly when we started setting up the Bat group, it was all calls of: ‘how do I get rid of them?'. And now people are saying ‘where would I get bat boxes?', ‘What type should I be using?' And people are really trying! 

And it really just takes everybody to do one thing, and that will make such a difference. If everybody put up a bird feeder or a bat box, or let the grass grow a bit long... A lot of it kind of suits laziness as well: you know, you don’t have to cut the grass! Let a few logs pile up in the corner of the garden; that's the hedgehog home. It's just kind of our obsession with being neat, we have to curb that a bit.