Things to look out for in the garden - gardening for Britain's wild mammals

Sadly, Britain's small mammals are being forced to retreat into gardens because farmland is becoming less attractive to them as a result of intensive farming. As a result, wildlife gardening has become big business. The bird feeding industry in Britain is worth £120 million a year.

You may be considering having a wildlife garden or at least a wildlife area in your garden but what is the real value to wildlife species of such spaces? The best-documented wildlife garden in Britain was monitored for a fourteen year period ending in 1986 - it was on a busy suburban corner in Leicester. 2,204 different species were recorded, including 21 kinds of butterfly, 263 species of moth, 91 hoverflies, 94 plants that arrived of their own accord and 59 vertebrate animals ranging from voles to blackbirds.

A town garden with a native tree or two, plenty of ground cover, a wide variety of plants with nectar-filled flowers and/or autumn berries and a gardener who doesn't use pesticides or herbicides rates highly as habitat although for real biodiversity, you need a location near mature gardens or parks with trees and hedgerows. You can add to the attractiveness of your garden by:

Cutting hedgehog holes in your fences - small enough for a cat, but big enough for the hedgehog, these are ideal for attracting both hedgehogs and mice into your green space. You can go the whole 'hog' and install a hedgehog home too, with a tunnel to protect the animal from predators while it hibernates.

Build and set up a bat box or two and then invest in a bat detector which picks up high frequency sound - use it to find out when bats are in the vicinity and also to help identify what species of bat is present.

A wooden squirrel feeder will attract squirrels away from your bird table and provide entertainment in its own right.

Dormice will use a bird nesting box quite readily for breeding or hibernating - to attract them, build a small box on a stand and place the hole facing the tree so the little mice can squeeze between tree and box to enter their new home.

Garden bat photograph by Garralus, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

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