Make yourself a nice cup of tea (or mulled wine perhaps?). Settle in a comfy armchair with a seed catalogue. Enjoy choosing some pollinator-friendly plants to grow in your garden, balcony or windowbox next year.
You can find lots of information about pollinator-friendly plants on the RHS website at http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardening/Sustainable-gardening/pdfs/RHS_Pollinators_PlantList 

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Welcome wildlife into your garden

Sign up to the RSPB ‘Homes for Wildife’ scheme to get lots of ideas for ways in which you can make your home and garden more wildlife friendly. You do not have to be an RSPB member to do this. http://www.rspb.org.uk/hfw

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Give the birds a drink

 

Make sure there is clean water available for wild birds to drink and bathe in. This can be an even more urgent need than food, especially in freezing weather. You don’t need to spend a fortune on buying a bird bath. A simple plant saucer with a stone in the middle will do the job very well.

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Home Sweet Home

 

Put up a bird box. Birds start investigating potential nest sites very early so the sooner they are in place, the better. For advice on building, siting and cleaning nest boxes visit the RSPB website http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/helpingbirds/nestboxes/smallbirds/index.aspx

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Keep a record

 

Get yourself a notebook and start keeping a nature diary. Note the natural day to day events that you see (e.g. when you see the first swallows) and your diary will soon become an interesting record. Sharing your records with wildlife organisations can be a powerful way of building up a broader picture of what is happening in nature. As a starting point, the Natural History Museum has a list of current surveys that you could become involved with: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/british-natural-history/uk-biodiversity-portal/get-involved/citizen-science-projects/index.html 

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Do the washing up!

Clean and wash your bird feeders, bird table and bird bath. Ideally, use a 5% disinfectant solution. Good hygiene can help to prevent the wild birds that visit your garden from catching diseases.  

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Snug as a bug!

Make a bug hotel.

Collect dried sticks, grasses, leaves, bits of bamboo cane, old logs and even broken bricks.

Pile them up in an undisturbed corner of the garden.

Invertebrates of all sorts will soon make their homes in your architectural masterpiece.

You can find instructions for a very simple bug hotel on Buglife's website at http://www.buglife.org.uk/Resources/Buglife/Create%20a%20bug%20hotel%202008%20pdf%20for%20web%20and%20colour%20print.pdf 

Did you try today’s activity? Please tell us by commenting below, emailing education@isleofwightzoo.com or sending us a message via Facebook or Twitter. We’d love to see some pictures, too!