How to support wildlife in your Australian garden this spring
Spring is the season when a garden's wildlife comes to life. The native bees that spent winter inside nest cells chew their way out. Lizards come up onto warm rock to rebuild condition after months of inactivity. Frogs start calling on the first warm nights. Birds pair up and begin feeding young that need a constant supply of insects.
Blue banded bee (Amegilla cingulata) — among the first solitary native bees to appear in suburban gardens as the weather warms, and one of the few Australian bees capable of buzz pollination.
This guide covers the six groups most likely to be using your Australian garden through spring and how they can be best supported at the moment when they are either nesting, breeding or feeding young. For the other half of the year, the winter wildlife guide covers the dormant season in detail.
Australian Native Seed Bombs
Scatter native seed directly into unimproved ground — no digging, no amendment required.
1. Native bees and butterflies
Bees and butterflies are the two groups whose requirements are the most specific in a spring garden. Bees need particular things from the soil and stems. Butterflies need the right plants to lay their eggs on. Neither has much of an alternative if a garden fails to provide it.
A butterfly taking nectar from willow bottlebrush (Callistemon salignus). Adults will feed on whatever is in flower, but it is the host plants elsewhere in the garden that decide whether there is a next generation.
The overwhelming majority of Australian bees are solitary. Eleven species are social stingless bees; everything else is a single female building and provisioning her own nest, with no colony, no hive and no honey. What that means is that every nest lost in spring is a whole lineage lost.
When native bees emerge
The first bees appear from late August and numbers build through September and October. Emergence is temperature-driven rather than date-driven, so it runs earlier in subtropical and warm temperate gardens and later in cool temperate ones. The riskiest window for garden work is the few weeks before you see any bees at all, when the nests are full and still sealed.
Teddy bear bee (Amegilla bombiformis) — a ground-nesting solitary bee widespread across eastern Australia. Females emerge from sealed burrows in dry, bare soil as the ground warms through September.
aussiegall from sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ground-nesting bees in the garden
If you noted ground nesting patches last season, work around them until November. Otherwise, look before you dig: the burrow is a clean circular hole roughly 3 to 8mm across, often with a small collar of excavated soil. Where there is one there are usually dozens. Mulching everywhere else in the garden is fine and useful. Leaving a few square metres of bare, sunny, undisturbed ground sustains this habitat.
Dawson's burrowing bee (Amegilla dawsoni) at a nest burrow entrance in arid Western Australia. The small collar of excavated soil around a clean circular opening is the mark of a ground-nesting bee, and it is soil rather than wood fibre or leaf debris.
Cal Wood, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Stem-nesting bees and spring pruning
The remaining species nest above ground in hollow stems, old beetle borings and existing cavities in timber, sealed at the entrance with mud, chewed leaf or resin. Delay the cutback of these until late spring, once emergence is finished. If a plant has to be cut sooner, leave at least 20cm of stem standing and put the cut material in a dry sheltered corner for a few months rather than into the compost.
Masked bee (Hylaeus species) — a small, wasp-like native bee that nests in hollow stems and existing cavities. Stems cut back too early in spring are cut with the developing brood still sealed inside.
linsepatron, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Butterflies need host plants, not just flowers
Nectar plants feed adult butterflies. Host plants are what produce more butterflies, because a female lays only on the plants her caterpillars are able to eat. Around 50 Australian butterfly species breed on grasses and about 25 depend on mistletoes which are native plants that grow in the canopies of trees.
Box mistletoe (Amyema miquelii) growing on a eucalypt. Mistletoe is routinely cut out of trees on the assumption that it is killing the host, and the azures that breed on it have nowhere else to lay.
MargaretRDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This means a garden with wattles, native peas, tussock grasses such as Poa and Lomandra and native climbers, and then accepting their leaves will be chewed. The adults want simple, flat, open flowers they can reach into along with a position that gets good sun but is sheltered from wind. A shallow damp patch of bare ground is worth adding too, because butterflies puddle there to take up water and dissolved minerals.
Common brown (Heteronympha merope) — one of the many Australian butterflies whose caterpillars feed on native grasses. Planting the host grasses matters more to a butterfly population than planting nectar for the adults.
Cairns birdwing caterpillar (Ornithoptera euphorion) — a tropical species whose caterpillars feed only on particular native vines. Specificity of this kind is why nectar alone never builds a butterfly population.
2. Hoverflies, beetles, wasps and moths
These are the pollinators that will use whatever a garden offers, and there are more of them at work than most people assume. Hoverflies earn their place twice over, because the adults pollinate while the larvae of many species eat aphids in quantity. Beetles work the open flowers of many natives. Native wasps visit flowers between hunting trips. Moths take the night shift on pale, strongly scented flowers that daytime insects never see. None of them will use a bee hotel or need a particular host plant. What they want is flowers with accessible nectar, an unsprayed garden and some leaf litter and rough ground to develop in.
Fiddler beetle (Eupoecila australasiae) — a flower chafer whose adults feed on nectar. The larvae develop in rotting logs and the damp soil beneath them, so the log pile and the flower border are the same piece of habitat.
Australian moth (Parapoynx villidalis). Moths are the least noticed of the garden pollinators because most of their work is done after dark, on pale and strongly scented flowers that daytime insects never visit.
What to plant, and what to stop spraying
Newly emerged bees need food immediately and within short flying range of the nest, and the shallow, open flowers that suit them are the same ones hoverflies, beetles and butterflies can use. That is why native daisies earn their place alongside banksias, callistemons, leptospermums and acacias. Planting for a long overlapping sequence matters more than planting any single species, and the wildflowers for native bees guide covers the choices in detail.
Tall native daisy (Brachyscome diversifolia). A shallow, open flower is reachable by short-tongued bees, hoverflies and beetles alike, which is why flower shape matters as much as flower count.
Insecticide applied to a flowering plant in spring reaches every insect using it. There is no version of this that takes the pest and spares the pollinator, and the caterpillar it kills is both the next butterfly and the food a nestling needs. Avoid spraying in all instances if possible.
Buzz pollination and the spring vegetable garden
Some flowers hold their pollen inside sealed tubes that only release it when the anthers are vibrated at the right frequency. A honeybee cannot do this. A blue banded bee can, and it buzz pollinates tomato, capsicum, chilli and other nightshades far more effectively than an introduced honeybee ever will. This is the clearest case of a native bee doing something in a garden that nothing else can, and it is the reason a spring vegetable patch, a few natives and a patch of undisturbed bare soil belong in the same garden.
3. Small birds
Spring is the breeding season for most Australian garden birds and the small insect-eating species that gardeners most want are the ones with the least margin for error. Fairy-wrens, thornbills, silvereyes and scrubwrens need dense cover to nest in, a continuous supply of invertebrates to feed nestlings and protection from the larger aggressive birds that dominate open gardens.
Scarlet robin (Petroica boodang) — one of the small insectivorous birds that depends on the invertebrate population a garden carries through spring. Nestlings are fed almost entirely on insects, not seed or nectar.
Structure beats species
BirdLife Australia's advice on this is blunt: a garden of tall trees over lawn attracts the common and often aggressive birds and very little else. What small birds respond to is vertical layering, meaning groundcovers and grasses, low shrubs, tall shrubs and a tree or two, with the shrub layer dense enough that a wren can move through it without being exposed. Prickly and densely twiggy species do the most work here, because they exclude larger birds by structure alone. Dense screening shrubs along a boundary and climbers on a fence serve as both cover and movement corridor.
White correa (Correa alba) — dense, twiggy shrubs of this kind give small birds the interior cover they need to nest and move through a garden safely, and exclude larger aggressive species by structure alone.
Do not prune the hedge in nesting season
This is the single most avoidable spring mistake. Breeding runs broadly from August through to January and an active nest in a dense shrub is very easy to miss from the outside. Check before cutting and if a shrub is holding a nest, leave the whole plant until the young have fledged. Structural pruning of dense shrubs is better done in late summer or autumn.
Insects are the food
Nestlings of small garden birds are raised on invertebrates, and BirdLife Australia's position is that the birds themselves are the most effective pest control a garden has. The garden invertebrate population is the base the whole thing rests on, which is the same reason the butterfly host plants are worth the leaf damage they attract.
4. Nectar-feeding birds
Honeyeaters, lorikeets, wattlebirds and spinebills are the most visible wildlife in most Australian gardens in spring, and the group most likely to be helped, but sometimes in the wrong way.
Red wattlebird on a waratah. A single large-flowered native in bloom feeds nectar birds without concentrating them at a shared feeder, which is the whole argument for planting the food rather than putting it out.
Plant the nectar
Do not offer honey and sugar solutions to these birds. Planting the source is a much better solution. A grevillea in flower supports honeyeaters without the disease risk of a shared feeder, and a garden planted for an overlapping flowering sequence across banksia, grevillea, hakea, melaleuca and correa carries them through the year.
Water is the exception
Water is the one supplement worth providing, particularly in the first hot spells. A bird bath should be shallow with a gently sloping side or a rock in the middle for footing, sited near cover. Dense planting nearby is what makes a bath usable by small birds rather than only by the larger ones.
A water source set among planting. Cover close by is what lets a small bird approach and retreat, and it is the difference between a bath the wrens use and one only the wattlebirds do.
On magpiesSwooping season runs from August to November, beginning earlier in the north and peaking around September in southern Victoria. It is nest defence rather than aggression, it lasts about a month while the chicks are in the nest, and fewer than one in ten male magpies does it at all. A magpie that has nested in or near your garden and is not swooping you is worth leaving alone entirely: magpies recognise individual people, and a bird that has decided you are not a threat generally keeps that view.
5. Reptiles
Blue-tongue lizards, garden skinks and dragons come out of brumation as the ground warms, after months of minimal feeding. Early spring is when they are most exposed: slow, actively seeking heat and spending long periods on open surfaces where they can be seen.
Blue-tongue lizard (Tiliqua sp.) — one of the most common garden reptiles across Australia. Blue-tongues mate between September and November, and females give birth to live young from December onwards.
Snail bait is the main killer
Blue-tongues eat snails and slugs, crushing the shells with heavy jaws. A garden that puts down snail bait or uses insecticides in spring is unfortunately feeding poisoned prey to the animal best equipped to control the population without help.
Mowing and cats
A blue-tongue faced with a mower hides in the grass rather than running, which is why long grass should be walked and checked before the first cut of the season. Cats and dogs take young lizards in numbers, and a garden with dense low cover and rock or log shelter gives them somewhere to be that is not the open lawn.
Cunningham's skink (Egernia cunninghami) basking. Reptiles emerging from brumation need open sun on a solid surface and cover within a short dash of it, which is what a rock stack beside dense groundcover provides.
What to provide
The arrangement reptiles need is simple: a basking surface in open sun, cover within a short dash of it and water. A stack of three to five large rocks or a log pile on a north-facing aspect, with dense groundcover planted around the base, covers all three. A shallow dish of water at ground level with a rock or stick for footing completes it.
6. Frogs
Frogs are the group that responds fastest to a change in garden management and the group most easily harmed by good intentions. Spring rain and warmth bring them out of winter shelter and into breeding, and calling starts on the first warm wet nights.
Peron's tree frog (Litoria peronii) — a widespread species found in gardens across eastern Australia and one of the first to call as spring nights warm.
Do not stock the pond
Moving frogs, eggs or tadpoles into a garden pond from somewhere else is harmful. It spreads disease between populations and the animals moved rarely do well. The method that works is to build the habitat and wait for whatever is local to find it, which in most suburban gardens takes just a season or two.
A garden left loose enough to hold its own habitat. Frogs arrive on their own where the surrounding ground offers damp shelter, which is why building conditions works and stocking the water does not.
Pond design
Vary the depth. Shallow margins let frogs get in and out and give tadpoles a warm zone, and a deeper section gives them somewhere cooler to retreat as the weather heats up. Plant the shallows densely with native aquatics and keep the surrounds planted rather than paved. Add shelter at ground level and running into the water: rocks, logs, thick leaf litter, a terracotta pot on its side. Most fish will eat eggs and tadpoles, so a frog pond is better left fishless unless you are stocking small natives such as pacific blue eyes or rainbowfish for mosquito control.
A garden pond with dense native marginal planting. Varied depth, planted shallows and shelter running down into the water are what make a pond usable by frogs rather than ornamental only.
Frogs absorb water and gases through their skin, which makes them acutely sensitive to anything applied nearby. No pesticide, no algaecide and no chemical pond treatment: clear algae by hand instead. The native pond and wet area planting guide covers the plant choices, and the wet soil guide covers the surrounding ground.
Tasks at a glance
| Group | What to do this spring |
|---|---|
| Ground-nesting bees | Leave bare, sunny soil patches undisturbed until November. Do not dig or spread mulch over a known nesting patch. Mark patches now for next season. |
| Stem-nesting bees | Delay cutting back hollow and pithy stems until late spring. If cutting early, leave 20cm standing and store the cut material in a dry corner. Mount a north-facing bee hotel. |
| Butterflies | Plant host plants, not only nectar plants: wattles, native peas, tussock grasses and native climbers. Leave the caterpillar damage alone. Add a shallow damp patch of bare ground for puddling. |
| Hoverflies and other insects | Plant shallow, open flowers such as native daisies for short-tongued insects. Keep leaf litter and rough ground for larvae. Stop all insecticide use through flowering. |
| Small birds | Check dense shrubs for nests before any pruning, and postpone hedge work until after January. Plant prickly and twiggy shrubs in layers. Stop insecticide use through the breeding season. |
| Nectar-feeding birds | Plant an overlapping flowering sequence rather than putting food out. Provide a shallow bird bath near cover and change the water rather than topping it up. |
| Reptiles | Stop using snail bait. Walk and check long grass before the first mow. Add a north-facing rock or log stack with groundcover around it and a ground-level water dish. |
| Frogs | Never move frogs, eggs or tadpoles in. Build varied depth and planted shallows, add shelter running into the water, and use no chemical treatments of any kind. |
The spring rule
Almost everything on the list above is a decision to not do something, or to do it later. That is the shape of spring wildlife gardening. The garden is asking to be cut back, dug over, tidied and baited at exactly the point in the year when the animals using it have the least capacity to absorb the disruption.
Fiddler beetle (Eupoecila australasiae) on flowering gum. The insects working a garden in spring are the direct result of what was left undisturbed through winter and what is left standing now.
The work that does pay off in spring is additive rather than subtractive: a rock stack, a shallow dish of water, a bee hotel, a layer of prickly shrubs, a pond left to be found. For the broader picture, the wildlife garden guide covers building habitat from the ground up, the spring tasks guide covers the general garden work of the season, and the spring planting list covers what to put in now.
keep reading
A Guide to Australian Native Gardening
How to plan, plant and care for a thriving native garden, whatever your experience level.
Read the guide →
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