How do I help garden wildlife in hot weather?

Hard ground in a drought is what hurts most garden wildlife, not the temperature directly. Worms go deep and become unreachable, so blackbirds and thrushes struggle and hedgehogs lose their main food supply. Ponds and puddles dry up. The practical response is water and shelter, provided in the specific forms that different animals can actually use.

Step by step

1. Put out water in several shallow places.One birdbath is good; three or four shallow dishes at different heights and in different parts of the garden is much better, because ground-feeding birds, hedgehogs, insects and amphibians all need different access. Ground-level dishes are the ones most often missing.
2. Make every water source escapable.This is the detail that matters most. Put stones, gravel or a sloping ramp in every container so that a bee, a beetle or a young hedgehog that falls in can climb out. A steep-sided dish of water is a trap, and drowned bees in a birdbath are a common and avoidable sight.
3. Refresh and clean it daily.Standing water in heat goes stale quickly and birdbaths are a route for disease transmission between birds. Tip it out, give it a scrub and refill with fresh water each day. This matters more in hot weather than at any other time.
4. Provide shade and cover.Let the grass grow long in a corner, leave leaf litter, build a log pile, keep planting dense. Everything from frogs to beetles to hedgehogs needs somewhere cool and damp to spend the middle of the day. A tidy garden with bare soil and short grass offers nowhere at all.
5. Leave the lawn long.Long grass shades the soil, keeps it cooler and damper underneath, shelters insects and holds moisture far better than a closely mown lawn. It also survives drought better itself. Not mowing in a heatwave helps you and the wildlife at once.
6. Help hedgehogs specifically.Shallow water at ground level, and meat-based cat or dog food or dedicated hedgehog food if you feed them. Never milk or bread, which they cannot digest. Make sure there is a gap in the fence so they can move between gardens to find water — a hedgehog can travel a long way in a night and a sealed garden is a trap.
7. Help bees and insects with a shallow drinking station.A saucer of water filled with pebbles or marbles so the surface is broken gives bees somewhere to land and drink safely. Refresh it daily. Sugar water is not needed and is not a good routine practice — an exhausted bee in genuine trouble is a different case from a general feeding station.
8. Keep feeding birds, but adjust it.Natural food is scarce when the ground is hard, so feeders still help. Avoid whole peanuts and large hard items in the breeding season since chicks can choke, use good-quality food, and clean feeders regularly — disease spreads fast at feeding stations in warm weather.
9. Keep the pond usable.As levels drop, a pond's sides become steeper and harder to escape from. Make sure the shallow beach or ramp still works at the lower level. A pond is the most valuable thing in a garden for wildlife in a drought.
10. Do not disturb the hiding places.Hedge cutting, strimming long grass, moving log piles and clearing leaf litter in a heatwave destroys precisely the cool refuges everything is relying on. There is also the legal position on nesting birds to consider through the season — leave it until autumn.

Tips

• A dish of water at ground level in shade, refreshed daily, is probably the single most useful thing anyone can do for garden wildlife in a hot spell.
• Sinking a shallow tray into the ground so its rim is flush makes it usable by everything from hedgehogs to insects and looks better than a dish on a slab.
• Windfall fruit left on the ground is valuable food and a moisture source for birds, insects and mammals when everything else is dry.
• If you find a hedgehog out in daylight in hot weather, it is usually in trouble. Provide water and shade and contact a local hedgehog rescue for advice.
• Birdbath water in full sun becomes unpleasantly warm within hours. Site them in shade where you can.

Common mistakes

• Providing deep water with no escape route — Bees, beetles and young animals fall in and drown. Stones, gravel or a sloping ramp in every container solves it entirely.
• Topping up a birdbath rather than emptying and cleaning it — Warm standing water in a shared drinking spot spreads disease between birds. Tip, scrub and refill daily in hot weather.
• Giving hedgehogs milk and bread — They cannot digest either and it causes serious harm. Water, and meat-based pet food or hedgehog food if you feed at all.
• Tidying up the garden in the middle of a heatwave — Long grass, leaf litter and log piles are the cool damp refuges everything is sheltering in. Strimming and clearing removes them at the worst possible time.

Questions people ask