Funny how we tend to think that providing food and habitat in the garden will create some kind of harmonious place where everyone gets along, a kind of Bambi scenario where all the animals are friends.
This wasn’t true with the insects, and it’s not the case with the birds, either.
I found a broken egg on the ground after noticing that the doves had not been in their nest for a day. The nest was apparently raided by other birds, the egg enjoyed as a quick meal.
Maybe the idea where the savage jungle is far away comes from nature films that show the African savanna as a constant struggle for survival between predator and prey. The reality is that this struggle is everywhere. It’s here, right in your own back yard.
As bad as things are for people, they’re much worse if you’re a dove. We watched a hawk snatch another dove from the sky as it flew between two trees (the dove survived, somehow). This is not the first nest that was raided by other birds, so I’d say successfully raising a family is pretty iffy when you’re a dove in the wild.
All of this isn’t anything new; it’s been going on for a long time, at least since the Pleistocene, maybe a million years ago. We weren’t here to watch, but then we were probably too busy back then dodging sabertooth cats and chasing mastodons.
Creating an ecological garden means just that – allowing natural processes to happen, creating habitat and food sources to increase the amount of energy in the food chain. It means that with more creatures living in the landscape there will be more instances of predation. A dynamic balance will hopefully allow populations of each species to remain, in numbers greater than if the landscape were sterile lawn and purely ornamental shrubs.
It does not mean that natural processes will cease, that every egg will become a bird or butterfly. That’s just not how nature works.