Helping reduce our garden ant population.

Last year we had a pair of Green Woodpeckers  (Pic Vert in French) around the garden for most of the year. In July we noticed the two adults and two juveniles feeding on our gardens ants.

The youngster learning how to find ants from the adult. How, in July, I will never know - the ground was like concrete!

Go and find your own I'm not feeding you any more!!!

Now four months on, with the ground penetrable, all four are regular feeders. This youngster certainly appears to have got the hang of it...

 

The green woodpecker is a specialist feeder and eats about 2,000 ants a day. So with four of them at it, that should be 56,000 less ants per week. Great!! Elizabeth is always getting ant bites when she is gardening.