It has been yet another weekend of gales here on the East Kent coastline. For the last few blustery days, Ferries have been sheltering alongside the meadows, a sure sign that there is disruption and passenger misery going on at nearby Dover port.

But the high drama of dark sky with lighter sea is very atmospheric:

We went along the coast up to Sandwich Bay to visit the Bird Observatory. They have just put some Motus aerials up:

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a landscape-scale research network studying the movements of migratory small animals that are fitted with antennae.  Not just birds – bats and large insects as well.

Below is a screenshot from the Motus website showing where they currently have aerials in our area:

We have been tentatively approached by Sandwich Bay Observatory to see if we would consider putting a Motus aerial up in the meadows, a few miles down the coast from them. We know so little about the whole thing at the moment but thought we would go to see these new aerials as a starting point.

While we were there, we went down onto Sandwich Bay beach, a lovely wild feeling place even though the land behind is covered by upmarket golf courses.

We saw a pair of Turnstones and turning stones were exactly what they were doing.

We also saw lots of Meadow Pipits. Note the super long claws on this bird:

Last February, a Meadow Pipit was ringed in the meadows, allowing us a close-up look at these claws, thought to be used as springs to catapult the bird quickly off the ground away from danger.

Now returning to the meadows, the Frog mating season continues in full flow and new spawn is still being laid:

A new female arrived at the pond leading to a rather unseemly tussle between two males to claim her and a resulting Froggy threesome that will need to get resolved before any spawn can be laid:

Our scarecrow is still keeping the Heron well away from these activities, but there are other animals hoping to cash in on the bonanza of distracted Frog meat that is currently concentrated in the ponds.

One o’clock in the morning and we got our first photo of a Tawny Owl in the meadows for a year, although they are frequently heard calling. Frogs are a well known constituent of a Tawny’s diet:

We got a better photo of a Tawny presumed catching Frogs back in 2018:

Foxes are also partial to the odd Frog:

Yes, we are watching you, so behave:

This stout Fox is surely full of cubs:

Although the weather continues foul, birds are pairing up everywhere. House Sparrows successfully raised three broods in this House Martin box last year. For at least a week now, a male Sparrow has been standing above the box and chirping really, really loudly and persistently. Maybe he has lost his mate and is trying to bring in a new lady?

A pair of Magpies are extremely busy constructing a nest at the top of a Pine tree:

The Yellowhammers are seen everyday on the strip now and we hope and presume that these have returned to breed:

Also, newly returned to the strip this week, after a winter spent elsewhere, are the Linnets. How lovely to see them back:

Skylarks are ascending and singing wondrously so high up in the sky:

Pairs of Larks are also cavorting together around the second meadow. Its a lovely sight to watch, although I am yet to get a photo of them. I will see what I can do for next time – some sunshine would help greatly.

House Sparrows have been on the strip all winter and they are still here in some noisy number:

Crows are also resident throughout the year, although often up to no good:

I forgot to take my camera with me when we visited the wood yesterday. However, what this poor photo below taken on my phone is showing is that thousands of trees are in the process of being planted in the field alongside the wood. The farm changed hands last year and the new owner has taken it out of agriculture to manage it for wildlife. This is an awful lot of trees to keep watered though – I wonder if they are going to try.

 

We saw a well-used animal track coming from this field into the new piece of wood that we have recently bought. A trail camera was put by the track to see what was using it:

It seems that the farmer is not the only one who has been out digging in the field.

The final photo today is of Primroses that are starting to come into flower in the wood, a tantalising taste of things to come:

 

 

We have a lot of trail cameras beavering away on our behalf to give us a little insight into the private lives of the animals that call the meadows and the wood their home. This does, however, mean that every day we have a great many photos and videos to go through, most of which are immediately discarded for being blurry or uninteresting. But every so often there is something that makes you shriek out loud.

At 4.45am on Saturday morning, there was this:

A tiny, hairless Badger cub was moved out of the sett by its mother.

Then, at 5.01, she returned:

At 5.03. she reappeared carrying a second cub:

She returned again at 5.07:

Then, thrillingly, at 5.09, a third and final cub was carried out of the sett. Triplets this year.

We think that she has moved them to a burrow that is very close by, although clearly not actually joined underground to the one that she always gives birth in. We estimate that these cubs are a maximum of two weeks old and I read that cubs’ eyes don’t open until five weeks old.

This female Badger had a single cub in 2017 (the year we first got a camera on the sett), twins in 2018 and 2019 and now she has given birth to three young. She is such a good mother, fiercely protective and firm but fair to her cubs. I think probably all Badger mothers are like that, but we have only ever observed this one.

Regular readers of this blog will know how much worry and emotion I have been putting into trying to save our Amphibians from the Heron and so will hopefully indulge me in some more celebration of this year’s successful Frog spawning season. The photo below is rather dark but all the white bits are the the brilliant white of the male Frogs’ throats as they await newly-arriving females. Given that the pond was entirely cleared of adult Frogs by the Heron this time last year, I am so happy to see how many of them there now are:

 

The Yellowhammers continue to visit the strip:

I was really pleased to see that one of the birds is ringed:

I presume that this is the bird that was ringed here last May and which has now returned to breed again:

I liked this photo also from the strip:

They look so much like a visiting group of bully boys. A Murder of Crows.

There is a large pile of hay that was cut from the meadows last autumn and is now slowly being bagged up and going off in fortnightly green waste collections through the winter. With all this wetness this year, it has sprouted large numbers of a cup fungus:

I have ploughed through the fungal identification books that we have but I’m afraid that still I am unable to tell you what species this is. There is an outcrop of another fungus in the tree copse but again I don’t know what this is. I’m hopeless with toadstools:

A Fox has been regularly going over this gate at night recently. What a lovely healthy tail:

A couple of weeks ago a few of our resident Foxes had picked up injuries. These Foxes are still around and so I hope and presume that their wounds are now recovering nicely:

I find it upsetting to have to look on helplessly in these circumstances.

Before I leave the meadows, there was this eggshell on the ground – somewhere around the place, a baby Pigeon has been born! Goodness.

Today, as I type, Storm Dennis is raging about our ears. I went to the wood a couple of days ago and found that it had got off lightly from the previous weekend’s storm, Ciara.

But given how strong those winds were at over 70mph and how many trees there are, we got off very lightly. But let’s see how we fair with Storm Dennis.

Three of the big raptor boxes are showing signs of occupation. This Tawny box now has sticks protruding:

The Kestrel box did have visible sticks a couple of weeks ago but these are not now to be seen. However the front board has many claw marks:

Another of the Tawny boxes also has visible sticks:

We are not sufficiently experienced in such matters to be able to tell from this what is in the boxes, but there certainly a lot of Grey Squirrels in the wood and I have my suspicions. In a few weeks we will check the boxes, but before then we will get a camera on a pole and try to see if we can observe what’s going on in there.

I like how this wood Badger goes over this trunk. It reminds me of old footage of tanks going across trenches in WWII.

Three Goldfinch in the wood, an unusual sight here:

But most of the wood photos continue to be dominated by our Pheasant population:

We are pleased to be providing sanctuary for these birds now that there is no longer a shoot here, but there certainly are a lot of them around.

So, there we are for today. I hope all the birds out there have found a sheltered little nook to safely see out the storm. However, I do know that those hairless little Badger cubs will be warm and cosy underground snuggled up with their mother and that’s a lovely thought.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were away from Kent during last weekend’s Storm Ciara. The meadows are frequently very windy, but in the five years under our management there have not been winds anywhere close to being as strong as the 75mph that were forecast for this storm:

We worried for the heavily ivy-clad trees along the cliff line and also about the domino effect of trees falling in the wood.

But, in the event, the only casualty was the swing seat in the meadows. Actually, we have long wanted to move this seat but it was too heavy for us to lift – now we are forced to get it sorted:

The Badger cubs have definitely been born underground. Badger mating happens as soon as the cubs arrive, and here we are:

This is a lovely serene Badger shot:

And some gentle, communal family time outside the sett:

A small group of Yellowhammer have arrived at the strip:

They are happy to go into the cages. There are three of them in the photo below:

I hope they are going to stay and breed here again this year.

Ivy is an overlooked plant but it plays an important part in the ecosystem in the meadows. It flowers in September and so provides a large source of nectar at a time of the year when most other flowers are withering. Hundreds of thousands of Ivy Bees hatch out here in September specifically to take advantage of this bonanza but many other species rely on it as well.

The Ivy berries then ripen during the winter, feeding birds through the hunger gap when other food is in short supply. The berries don’t all ripen at once and there are just so many of them that sustenance is provided over many of the cold winter weeks.

 

A large Ivy plant by the hide pond is absolutely loaded with ripe fruit at the moment and I counted fourteen Woodpigeon feasting on it the other day:

I put a trail camera to work to see if it could catch them at it. It turns out that it could:

Another really amazing thing about Ivy is that it has two phases of growth. Its juvenile form has a three-lobed leaf with long stems that shoot quickly upwards when they find a vertical surface, holding on with a mass of roots that sprout from their stems. This juvenile stage doesn’t flower or form fruits.

Once the plant is about ten years old and has become established, the growth changes to the mature phase which looks very different. The leaves change shape, becoming unlobed, the growth becomes shrubby and the plant now flowers and fruits.

Although the juvenile Ivy does provide shelter for animals, it is only really when the plant switches to its mature phase that its wildlife credentials properly get going.

Mackenzie, our scarecrow, has done a fantastic job. He loyally stood out on his own by the pond throughout Storm Ciara and managed to remain upright. Most pleasing of all is that the Heron has not visited the pond once since he went on guard.

The Frogs have got busy. These photos were taken at night down at the pond before we left, using a torch and the camera flash:

The Frogs had just started mating then. The female’s tummy below is very full of spawn:

We have returned to find Mackenzie standing proudly over a pond full of frog spawn:

It feels like a big victory.

The Owl has been in the same place in the wood looking for worms while we have been away:

I like the atmospheric setting of the final photo for today. Silver Birch woods have a lot of winter interest.

 

 

 

 

 

At 11pm on Friday night, we left the European Union. The next morning, we looked towards France and it was nowhere to be seen. We appeared to be in splendid isolation and, by the time of writing this post on late Sunday afternoon, Europe has yet to reappear.

Hopefully it is still there though and will show itself again soon. I really like France.

We have spent some mornings working in the wood recently and have realised that the coppicing project has been really rather revolutionised now that we have this lightweight battery-powered chain saw. A few proper trees have even been taken down to let even more sunlight hit the woodland floor in the coppicing area.

This has created some lovely wood that we can use for wildlife habitat back in the meadows:

In February 2017, we bought some logs from a tree surgeon and made a Beetle habitat, whose larvae live in rotting wood under the ground. We dug the logs in deep:

Now, three years later, it looks like this:

Whilst we have no way of telling if the wood below ground is making itself useful to Beetle larvae, the bit above ground looks like great habitat these days. In fact, as we stood and looked at it, a little Wren was poking amongst the trunks.

We have decided to dig another of these now, this time using supplies from our own woodland.

Last winter we built a log shack down by the wild pond. Our motivation for this was to have a roof that could be fitted with a gutter and downpipe that fed into the pond, to increase its catchment area.

Since the catchment area of the pond could still do with being larger, I hope that we will also find time to build another of these this year. The stack of wood underneath will be providing great shelter for all manner of things as it gently rots down, not least the amphibians from the pond.

In the last post, we had had a bit of a brainwave to build a scarecrow to put down by the pond as a Heron deterrent.  I brought some likely pieces of timber back from the wood to use as his skeleton:

We put flesh on his bones with the wool insulation from Gousto deliveries and went to charity shops in Deal to buy him some clothes – including a child’s knitted hat with a face on it which we put over an old dog ball as a head.

I am really hopeful that this is going to work, but only time will tell. He has now been guarding the pond for nearly a week and there has been no sign of the Heron on the cameras.

Moving back to the wood, we are getting some nice photos of the Tawny hunting for worms:

Most of the newly-acquired wood is so densely planted that there is no understorey of plants on the ground. However, the small area below is a bit more open and has some Bramble growing. As we walked through it, we put up four Woodcock – they clearly like the protection that the Bramble provides. We will leave this area alone now for the rest of the winter until the Woodcock have gone.

There are a lot of Pheasants in the wood. Before the woodland changed hands, there used to be a big winter shoot here and I presume that game birds were released into the countryside for these purposes and that these birds are connected with that.

There are two males:

One of these looks decidedly like a glorious patchwork quilt:

It seems it is not too early for them to be displaying to females:

I think the Kestrel box in the wood must be occupied. There is scratching in the front board and some sticks are protruding:

We will tie a trail camera onto a pole and see if something can be seen going in or out. Although my bet is that it is a Squirrel and I am not getting excited.

It has been sunny and almost warm in the meadows this weekend:

We walked around and spotted many cheering signs of spring:

Yesterday lunchtime, a male Sparrowhawk came in for a bath:

Then, 45 minutes later, his much larger and heftier wife also came in:

I probably don’t strictly need to include this photo of a Fox at the Badger sett, but I like it. Like domestic dogs, male Foxes cock their legs.

The hedgerow project has now officially been completed, since we have decided not to plant Oak standards along its length as we had originally been planning:

We are going to need to keep it watered during this coming first summer and probably the second one as well while the roots properly develop – and there are 600 new plants there. We have taken delivery of a trickle feed hose system:

The idea is that the water slowly oozes out through the fabric of the hose. It is, however, only 30m long and we have 85m of new hedgerow and so it will have to be moved around to different sections of the hedge. I expect that it is all going to be a bit of a struggle as usual.

The final photo today is an astronomical one. On Monday and Tuesday this week there was a thin crescent moon in conjunction with Venus, the brightest planet. My photography skills were not up to capturing how incredibly beautiful this was in the clear night sky, but the photo below does give some indication.