I keep my grass short by necessity.
Our Joe Blakes love the cover high grasses offer.
Kookaburras are their main predator.
I manage my garden with flowering plants and herbs that attract birds and insects but keep the snakes away.
I encourage our stingless native bees to my garden, their honey is quite edible and they pollinate the plants. All insects are welcome in my garden, as long as they are in homeostasis.

I agree with the sentiment but do not have creating a nature preserve as the sole aim of my gardening. The other aim I serve is to create a garden that aesthetically elicits that feeling of awe we get in nature.

My favorite bird visitors also nest here. Hummingbirds have been nesting here for a long time. One time one made her nest in a young tree euphoria, less than three feet of the ground. I had my misgivings but babies fledged.

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My other favorite birds which visit frequently are bushtits. Large gangs of them roll through my garden in waves picking off tiny critters including aphids and scale insects. This past November I discovered this 18 inch hanging nest while pruning a climbing rose growing over arching trellis. They seem to favor some of the same building materials as the hummers. I literally passed under their nest at least four times each day to feed the dogs but never saw it. Freeing it from the thorns wasn’t easy and it looked better before I did.

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The bushtits are.nearly as small as the hummers. While hummers will drive off much larger birds, they find something else to do when the bushtit gang is working through one of the shrubs and trees on their route. If course neither competes for the other’s food stuff since hummers eat nectar from flowers.

I filmed the bushtits working through this orange flowering Iochroma while taking a break from pruning it. I saw a hummer nectarine from flowers attached to branches I’d already taken down while filming this. These branches still standing are about 20 feet tall and I was in a lounge chair filming on my iphone set to x6 magnification, hence the grainy poor quality of the video.

Hummers are always in the garden but always solo unless they’re driving another off. I took the next video to give a view of the garden from outside our side door, and then right down the driveway to the back garden and pond. But I ended it when I came to a hummer feeding first on the ref flowers if Salvia wagneriana and then the mostly orange flowers of Lobelia aguana.