Does the artificial lighting in your garden have an effect on the wild life? More particularly the sort that comes on automatically when anything moves in the darkness - a dog maybe, even a stray cat. A correspondent in the English magazine Country Life tells us that the effect of security lighting on birds and animals has been dramatic. His house stands in two acres of mixed gardens in a secluded village in Yorkshire. The security lighting extends over the house, which is covered on all sides with climbers and reaches to about half the garden. The first thing they noted about the wildlife was that virtually no birds nested in the climbers on the year the lights were installed. Only the wrens kept the faith. The owners have also lost swifts and swallows which no longer nest in the eaves, but have gone to the outbuildings. That's something anyway. However, what the writer describes as "our resident barn owls" have moved from the drive to a post some metres to the back of the house. Deer which used to visit, have left and even the rabbits will not approach it any more. Lucky man. The resident fox is unfazed. The blackbirds, interestingly enough, go on voicing long after the lights have gone off. "I cannot say that we have noticed any reduction of birds in the garden and we do not know whether keeping the lights on all the time would have a different effect, but it is very apparent that the pattern of bird life in our garden has altered dramatically."
This raised an interesting point with a friend who had complained that he had not had swallows or house-martins for the last few years. Looking back, this was at about - he can't be more specific - the time he had these warning night lights installed, and one of them was up in the eaves just below where their nests used to be. He never connected the two. In another house, which has halogen lights on from dusk to dawn more or less, there seems no change. There are as many birds in the walled garden, and out on the lawn, the badgers follow their normal track to the monkey nuts and bread, and the fox makes his occasional sallies.
But all this has put an idea into the mind of the woman of the house - the one first mentioned. Rabbits have been eating to the ground her dwarf azaleas. A light to scare them off, for they only descend at night, is now on order. She doesn't want to spoil her enjoyment by enclosing the flowers with chicken wire.