TOWN GARDEN WORD PICTURE

Imagine a busy street, full of houses and shops. Our picture shows a grey road, a brick wall with graffiti scrawled on it, tower blocks in the distance and a row of recycling bins. There are cars chugging by in a traffic jam and the air is thick with the smell of exhaust fumes.

This is the Town Garden. It is the most polluted garden you will visit on our journey around the world. Most of the people in the world live in towns or cities. These are called urban areas. Lots of wildlife lives alongside people in towns. An urban fox is lurking by dustbins in the Town Garden.

Foxes try to keep out of sight during the day. You might spot one out hunting for mice or looking for food scraps at night. Foxes can see, smell and hear very well. This makes them expert hunters and helps them to stay hidden.

Yikes, there’s a rat hiding under the Town Garden manhole cover!

There are about sixty million people in the UK. There are also about sixty million rats. On the whole rats hide away as much as they can. They live in drains, tunnels and abandoned buildings and rubbish tips.

Rats are nocturnal which means they come out at night to look for food. They have very strong front teeth and can even gnaw through metal pipes. Their teeth are always growing unlike ours, and this stops them getting worn down.

Pigeons are well suited to life in towns. Like foxes and rats they can eat the food humans throw away. The pigeon in our Town Garden has found some crumbs to peck at.

Did you know that pigeons mate for life? Also, the male pigeons as well as the females produce a type of milk to feed the chicks with. If we chose to walk, share our cars, use bicycles and use public transport, our towns would soon look very different. The air would be cleaner and we’d have much less pollution.

It takes all sorts of gardens to make a world and they all need looking after.