Its been the sort of weekend that I would describe as Double Coat Weather. One coat simply isn’t enough out there. However, that hasn’t stopped the Kingsdown sea bathers from going into the water from the beach below the meadows:

I suspect that’s a great way to kick start any day.

In the last post, I mentioned a Fox that was carrying a Dogfish:

Well, here he is again but this time with a Whiting or Pollock:

At the point the video was taken, he was in the process of realising that he had a problem and that this fish was not going to go through the hole in the fence and out into the meadows.

Also in the last post, there was the sad news of a Woodcock that had flown into glass and died. Here is a close up of his feathers. How beautiful he was:

The bird ringer came again with one of his trainees and they caught this Collared Dove. This is the biggest bird that has been ringed here. Interestingly, doves have an anti-predator adaptation in that they shed feathers to try to leave their attacker with a mouthful of feathers while they get away, a bit balder but alive. Certainly there were many feathers around the ringing station after this bird had been processed.

Another wasp nest has been dug out and combs scattered on the ground:

This nest had been made inside a mouse nest and was very active indeed in the late summer. Now, however, it looks abandoned and I doubt that the badger got anything out of it.

The hole was quite large and deep – I presume that the wasps had enlarged it because it seems much more capacious than you would think a mouse nest would need to be.

There are now four Grey Partridge feeding on the strip rather than the three that we have had all summer and autumn:

Lovely to see them there.

Its cold, damp and a little bit dreary out there. Here we are, only at the end of November, but already nostalgic for the green shoots and emerging butterflies of spring.