wildlife at the farm
As well as our farmyard animals and resident mousing cat, the Farm is also home to so much wildlife, with some species here being rare and protected.
Tucked away on the left as you enter the farmyard is the Wildlife Garden. Abundant with native flora and fauna, this small miniature woodland is home to our colony of rescued honeybees, which not only produce delicious honey under the careful guidance of volunteer beekeeper Salvatore, but also have an invaluable role as pollinators across the Farm and beyond. In this area we have also observed azure damselflies, small red damselflies, large red damselflies, Buff tailed bumblebees, common bumblebees, hoverflies, common blue butterflies, and plentiful peacock butterflies.
To further promote biodiversity, we have dug out a series of ponds in this area, which are the main breeding habitats for our resident protected Great Crested Newts, Smooth Newts, and Palmate Newts, as well as the common frog, and many invertebrates like dragonflies, pond skaters, beetles and snails. Great Crested Newts have been on Earth for around 40 million years, and during that span of time they have suffered from a variety of human impact including loss of habitat, pollution, disease threat and climate change. We are extremely lucky that they’ve chosen to call this site home, especially being so close to the city and in such a highly developed area; they were first discovered here in the 1990’s. Sadly, we no longer seem to have any toads - although we did used to see them, and maybe one day they’ll return. In 2024 we participated in an eDNA pond sampling project called GenePools, and this found insects, barnacles, springtails, spiders, worms, molluscs, mites, hairybacks, echinoderms, and cnidaians in all our ponds. We also have THREE types of algae - red, golden and brown.
Further along the path, we have created a mycelium area, where we’ve started growing Wine Caps and Oyster mushrooms as part of our education programme. This growing area is visible from the farmyard path, and is near the third and furthest pond. In the same eDNA project just mentioned, Zygomycete, Sac, and Monobleph fungi were all found in our ponds too.
We’re also regularly visited by foxes, with one mother several springs ago choosing to birth a little of cubs under our Herbal Hide. We see feeding bats at dusk and dawn, mainly the Common Pipistrelle, which we’ve picked up on bat detectors and spotted with the naked eye. They particularly love feeding in the air above the ponds, which is inhabited by plenty of midges and other flying insects. We have plans in the pipeline to install more bat boxes, to encourage them to live on site with us. The East End of London is one of the most highly developed stretches of land in the country, and their habitats - despite being protected under UK and EU law - are frequently at serious risk.
Lastly, we have plenty of wild birds, including thrushes, starlings, Robin Redbreasts, house sparrows, sparrowhawks, jaybirds, crows, magpies, woodpeckers, great tits, coal tits, goldfinches, the occasional lost coot, and we once had an injured herring gull crash land too! (We got her to a wildlife vet).
