It has taken me a surprisingly long time to realise that the Green Woodpeckers nest in the wood is in the exact same hole that the Great Spotted Woodpeckers used last year. This photo from 2019 shows the Great Spotted bringing food to his chicks.

This year, the camera is in a slightly different position but it is clearly the same hole that is being used by the Green Woodpeckers. I didn’t know they reused the holes of other species like that:

Young Squirrels, with their insubstantial tails, are now out and about on their own in the wood and how very sweet they are:

The peace and solitude to be found in the wood is, now more than ever, a thing to be treasured. We stood quietly for a while amongst the Ferns watching the Blue Tits working in the tops of the Birches, seeking out insects with which to feed their young. We think all twelve of the small boxes that we have put up now have nests with hungry families within. We shall be putting more up this coming autumn.

With the lockdown rules now slightly eased, we met up with one of our children in the wood this week. It was the first time that we had seen any of our children for months and months and it felt like a small but significant step forwards. Here we are, celebrating our reunion, with some delicious pink champagne, pandemic style, whilst socially distanced in the wood.

Back in the meadows, the ponds are really interesting at this time of year.

For several years, the late May Bank Holiday has only meant one thing for us –  Emperor Emergence time. Up to a hundred larvae would climb up the reeds on a warm, still evening and transform themselves into Britain’s largest Dragonfly, the magnificent Emperor. But last year, and this year as well it seems, there have only been a handful of them emerging.

The ecosystems in our ponds are maturing and so may no longer suit Emperors so well who are pioneers of new ponds.

Damselflies are also very busy at this time of year.

For all the many thousands of Tadpoles that hatched into the ponds, very few still seem to be around. But those that are to be seen are now very much larger and starting to develop back legs:

Various Dragonfly larvae of all different sizes are a prominent feature of the life in our ponds. We pulled some blanket weed from the hide pond and we kept having to extricate these and return them to the waters.

This is interesting – a Caddis Fly larval case, probably Limnephilus flavicornis. The larva has cut pieces of plant material  – all nicely to the same length – and used glue to stick these along with sand and other bits from the pond to form a hard and portable house for itself.

This next photo from the internet is a different species of Caddis Fly but gives the idea of how the larva would use its house.

While we were poking around in the ponds, something thrashing around wildly in the grass beside us caught our attention. It was this:

When Slow Worms are threatened by a predator, they can discard their tails which keep moving and hopefully cause a sufficient diversion to enable the front of the animal to escape. I knew this happened but I had no idea that there was so much movement involved. It was really quite unnerving to see something without a head moving around quite so much.

So much about the natural world is fascinating. How does this moth know that it is green and so needs to find a green trunk to disguise itself on?

This is a very striking-looking Beetle – the Red-headed Cardinal Beetle.

Here she is, the lovely little one-eyed vixen that I have become so fond of this spring.

For the past seven weeks we have been treating her and one other Fox for mange by putting out medicated jam sandwiches at dusk. Although we had seen fur growing back on the tail of the other Fox, this vixen didn’t seem to be responding so well.  However, in the photo above, it is clear that white fur is now growing at the top of her right thigh. Although still not a pretty sight, her tail also has fewer bare patches as well.

Our job is now done and we can stop putting out the sandwiches. Or can we? Each evening, as I set out on my walk to dish out the sandwiches and peanuts, two beautiful Foxes have started waiting to waylay me along my route and I always throw them some of the bread. I can’t really remember now how this started, but I have built up a certain level of expectation in them and I hate the thought of them waiting there patiently for me and I do not arrive.

I have decided to continue with the sandwiches, albeit now non-medicated. I remember, back in the days when we still went on holidays, how very stressful it was going away from these meadows  – arranging cover to refill the bird feeders, put out the peanuts, water the allotment. Foxes expecting sandwiches at dusk will surely only increase that pre-holiday stress but I will cross that bridge when I come to it and not think of it now.

Meanwhile, the Badgers are enjoying the peanuts.

Here they are having some companionable family time at the sett:

There is still a flock of Starlings rising and falling in the meadows:

A lot of this group are youngsters:

This Crow came in with a Crab claw, perhaps trying to soften it in the water to make it easier to eat. I can’t imagine that this worked.

We are yet to see a Turtle Dove here, but are delighted that a pair of Grey Partridge are back. They haven’t posed in front of the trail cameras for us but the cameras have captured some other interesting photos this week:

The Buttercups are going over now and it is the turn of the Oxeye Daisies to have their moment:

Never before have we lavished so much time and attention on the allotment:

Swathes of Salad Burnet in the meadows are going to seed:

I think their flower heads look like tasselled lampshades from the high Victorian era:

Broomrape (Orobanche minor) is parasitic on Clover and therefore doesn’t need green chlorophyll to photosynthesise and make its own food. They are attached to the host by underground haustoria which grab nutrients from the Clover and transfer them back to the Broomrape.

Common Broomrape can be a variety of different colours – we have a patch of really quite yellow stems of it in the first meadow:

The wild Honeysuckle is out in bloom creating the most fantastic pockets of fragrance as we walk round the meadows. Good for checking that one hasn’t lost one’s sense of smell.

The Hoary Plantain is one of the highlights for me at the moment:

I am not sure if this last photo really captures how surreal this was: on this particular afternoon, the sea merged invisibly into the sky and this ferry appeared to be flying through the air into Dover:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The one-eyed vixen has brought out her cub:

Over the past few weeks, we have been treating her for mange but it is a slow process and I was worried that her cub would have caught mange from her before the medicine had had a chance to work. But, as it turns out, the cub is perfect:

Or are there two cubs:

I haven’t managed to properly work this out yet but I think the other cub might have a different mother.

The one-eyed vixen still looks pretty tatty even after all this time of putting out medicated jam sandwiches for her. She hasn’t got any worse but there are no signs of her fur growing back yet. However, there was another mangey Fox that we were also targeting who had a very ropey tail. Here he is in mid April:

Delighted to see how well he is doing now with fur growing back along the length of his tail. And lovely to feel like we have made a bit of a difference.

With all these young animals, there are many more takers for the peanuts at dusk:

When did we last have rain? It has been another tremendously dry spring and the ground is very hard and difficult to dig for worms in. At this point, the mother Badgers will be gradually weaning their cubs and withdrawing their milk so that the cubs have  to learn how to feed themselves. I read that, in years of spring drought, there is a great death toll amongst the young Badgers who are not strong enough and experienced enough to get to the worms that make up 70% of their diet and they simply starve.

We will do what we can to help by increasing the amount of peanuts that go out each evening until it next rains but currently there is no rain to be seen in the forecast. This does mean, of course, that we are getting through a tremendous amount of peanuts. We buy all our bird food from Vine House Farm – a farm in Lincolnshire that manages to be extremely wildlife friendly whilst still making a profit with their farming of bird food. Nicholas Watts showed a group of us from Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory round his farm a few years ago and we were extremely impressed with what he is achieving there. He trials conservation ideas out on the farm and shares the results with other farmers.

Although we rarely see Buzzards here, shockingly there was a dead one lying on the grass one morning.

The bird ringer came up to have a look at it and reported that it had broken its neck, presumably by accidentally flying into something. We put it onto the cliff path for the Foxes:

The bird ringer has been doing some ringing here as well, now that The British Trust for Ornithology are once again allowing ringing outside one’s own garden.

He ringed four more Yellowhammer:

He also caught two Whitethroat, a male and a female. The female had a brood pouch indicating that she was nesting:

The female Whitethroat was born this time last year. She has then flown all the way to Africa and back and still has the same feathers that she grew whilst in the nest. The middle tail feathers are practically bare by this stage:

She now needs to raise her family and get them fledged and away and then she can finally moult and clothe herself in some more efficient new feathers to return to Africa later this summer.

At this time of year, the easiest way to sex Starlings is by their eye ring. The chestnut outer ring shows that this is a female. A male eye would be all black.

This Blackbird has been born this year. It is nice to discover that some nests manage to stay under the radar of the ever-watchful scrutiny of the Magpies and Crows.

When I initially looked at this photo below, I thought that the Herring Gull was sorting out our over-abundant Magpie problem but then I saw that, of course, I was mistaken.

We have also been seeing baby Robins and, in the last couple of days, a large number of recently fledged Starlings have appeared. The adult Starlings will now go straight on to having another brood whilst the offspring of the first broods will hang around in a gang together, working the meadows for invertebrates in the soil.

Brown Argus Butterflies have made their first appearance of the year in the meadows:

They are very small Butterflies but not as tiny as the Small Blue:

I thought I was seeing a Spider with a blue abdomen crawling in the soil and I ran for my camera:

We caught it in a jam jar and discovered that actually it is a female Wolf Spider (Pardosa monticola or palustris) carrying her egg sac:

The Oxeye Daisies are starting to come out in the meadows. They seem to be especially abundant this year:

The chalk-loving Hoary Plantains (Plantago media) are also coming into flower, looking like wonderful sparklers:

A couple of weeks ago, I reported to you that a Roe Deer had visited the wood. I now know I have misidentified this very large Deer:

We are blessed with like-minded neighbouring wood-owners and this Deer has also been in their wood. They have images of it from behind and calculated the height to its shoulders to be around 1 metre by seeing how high it came up a tree. The upshot is that it seems that this is a Red Deer, which is surprise because their distribution map doesn’t show them in East Kent.

The rump of a Roe Deer, its smaller size and its head shape are all very different.

We might not often see Buzzards in the meadows but we frequently see them in the wood:

Last year, a pair of beautiful Bullfinch nested in the wood and came to this pond every day, in due course also bringing their three fledglings. I had hoped that they would be back again this year and perhaps these photos mean that they are:

I hope to get better images of this pair as the summer progresses. We are also trying to improve the photos taken at the Green Woodpeckers nest:

Although the Great Spotted Woodpecker from time to time comes to peer into the hole, I don’t think that they are nesting in the same tree. But once the young start calling, they are so noisy and insistent that we should be able to pin down what’s going on.

Now that the nights are starting to warm up, I am getting much larger catches of Moths in the Moth trap and it takes quite a time the next morning to go through and identify them all. Last year I really didn’t have the space in my life to do this and ended up cherry picking the easy ones. This year, however, improving my moth recognition skills is exactly what I should be doing whilst locked down. Actually I am finding it incredibly satisfying to put the time in and get them correctly recorded. So, this year, for the first time, I will be proudly submitting my results to the County Moth Recorder – a small positive to come out of a terrible time.

It is always very satisfying to find a jigsaw piece that had previously been missing and slot it into its proper place in the puzzle. Mason Bees build walls of mud in their nests to create cells, into which they deposit a pile of pollen and lay a single egg. We have seen them gathering and carrying the pollen but, up until now, we have never been able to establish where they are getting their mud from.

There are lots of them at work in the orchard and the hedgerows, collecting pollen from the flowers. Rather than carrying the pollen in baskets on their legs like Honey Bees and Bumble Bees, they hold the pollen on their tummies. This is a very inefficient way of doing things and pollen gets knocked off every time they visit another flower – which is what makes them fantastic pollinators, of course. Apparently it takes 20,000 Honey Bees to pollinate an acre of fruit trees but just 250 Mason Bees. What pollination heavy-weights they are.

But it was a mystery where they were getting the soil from to make the mud walls. It needs to be damp and so we had looked at the edges of the ponds to see if they are going there but they didn’t seem to be. Now – and this is where our breakthrough comes –  for the first time, the Badgers have dug a tunnel that opens into the meadows rather than onto the cliff and, on a warm, sunny afternoon this week, I noticed that Bees were buzzing in down the tunnel.

Getting down immediately onto my knees and peering in, sure enough, I saw that Red Mason Bees were flying about a foot down where it was cool, shady and moist and gathering up balls of soil.

Such a revelation. It won’t only be Badger tunnels that they are using but we now know the sort of soil that they are looking for.

There is quite a worrying size disparity between the young Badgers.

The single cub, born to the younger, inexperienced mother is not growing like the triplets are.

Not only is it very small compared to the triplets, it is also still being dragged around by its mother several times a night:

It all feels not quite right but there is nothing we can do. Everything might anyway be fine – the young Badger certainly remains very lively and is playing well with the other cubs.

The male, Scarface, is interacting with the triplets below for the first time that we have seen. He must have come up under the fence and happened upon them by accident.

The mother comes forward and gives him a sharp rebuke and he immediately fades away backwards under the fence. He knows he is not allowed around the cubs at this stage and he completely accepts the telling off.

It has been cold and breezy for most of the week and, in particular, bitter north-easterly winds gusting to 55mph blew solidly over Sunday and Monday. One of the Seatrade vessels sheltered alongside us on Monday – this is Pacific Reefer, a refrigerated cargo ship, that brings Caribbean fruits once a week into Dover. She carries bananas and pineapple below deck and containers of avocados, mangos, papayas, grapes, pomegranates and melons on the deck. She left Paita in Peru on 26th April, navigated her way through the Panama Canal, made her way across the Atlantic Ocean and arrived here in a gale on 11th May, 15 days later.

Another ship that caught our attention this week was the Sky Princess, travelling from Rotterdam to Limassol in Cyprus. This cruise ship was only launched in October 2019 and can carry 3,660 guests and 1,346 crew and should have a 3 star Michelin chef on board. She did manage to get some Caribbean cruising in over the winter before all cruises were cancelled until further notice. I wonder how many people there are currently on board?

From time to time, however, the winds dropped and we heaved sighs of relief.  Here are some of the things that have been going on:

Like Red Mason Bees, Moths are also very important pollinators, although often overlooked by us humans since they mostly visit the flowers in the dark. Their furry bodies transfer the pollen around really nicely.

Although this bird below might look like it is a miserable victim of some drowning accident, regular readers will know very well that this is a perfectly healthy Green Woodpecker rubbing itself in sand after a bath.

Although Green Woodpeckers are definitely the winners when it comes to extreme bathing, to my mind Jays come second. Here is one from the wood:

The wood is completely glorious right now:

This Song Thrush was gathering a lot of nesting material from around the pond area:

A Buzzard has been hunting in this spot often over the past few weeks. I have had a look to see if I can see anything particularly interesting there, but found nothing.

There are not a lot of Foxes in the wood but this one looks very healthy with a fantastic tail:

Here it is with prey – looks like a bird to me.

We have kept the camera on a pole looking at the Green Woodpecker nest:

There is now a second camera on a pole hopefully looking at two other holes in the same tree to see if either of them are also being used this year. I will report back after our next visit.

In the regeneration area, the Guelder Rose trees (Viburnum opulus) are under attack:

These are the larvae of the Viburnum Beetle, Pyrrhalta viburni. A native British Beetle but occurring here in numbers such that the leaves are being reduced to lacework. Not surprisingly this is seen as a garden pest – no gardener would want this happening to their Viburnums.

I couldn’t find a single Guelder Rose that was unaffected. Hopefully the trees will grow more leaves once these larvae have pupated, but we will have to wait and see.

If I had any ability at all to paint, I would love to try to capture the drama and movement onto canvas of this last photo below. It is a really interesting composition and such a painting would look great on our wall.

 

 

 

 

We had a quiet and contemplative al fresco lunch today to mark the 75th anniversary of VE day. We know from old mapping that, not twenty metres from where we were sitting, there was a slit trench and an observation post looking out towards France during the war. It feels important to spend some time acknowledging what terrible times those were.

The wood in May is absolutely glorious. The Ferns are gently unfurling and the trees becoming clothed in fresh, green leaf.

Because the feeders were not filled up for so long, we have lost a lot of our birds and the feeders, now replenished, hang there forlornly unvisited. However, we looked in a few of our small nest boxes as we walked around and every one had a nest in, so not all birds have deserted us:

Last year we found a Great Spotted Woodpecker nest with loudly-calling young in a large Cherry Tree. This year, there is a new hole drilled into the same tree – they do sometimes use the same nest but often make a new one instead. We tried to arrange a camera on a long pole so that it pointed at this new hole to get some photos of the Great Spotted Woodpeckers going in and out. However, we didn’t get the camera position quite right and it was instead pointing at a different hole altogether. In the event, this turned out to be quite fortuitous:

This older hole turns out to be an active Green Woodpecker nest. Green Woodpeckers, with softer beaks since they are generally pecking into soil to eat ants, do use the same hole repeatedly. They lay a single batch of 4-6 eggs in May and both parents share the incubation.

So, are Great Spotted Woodpeckers also nesting in this same tree as these Green Woodpeckers? We will get a second camera up on a pole and see if we can find out.

As well as lots of photos of Green Woodpeckers at this hole, the trail camera did also capture a Squirrel peering in. Actually it did this on several occasions and I read that apparently Grey Squirrels can be significant predators of bird nests.

And also a Great Spotted Woodpecker had a look in:

Even though we have been very absent recently, we have our trusty trail cameras to show us some of the things that have been going on without us. Like this, for instance:

This is such a big animal with very knobbly knees – a Roe Deer. In fact, the same Deer turned up on a different camera as well and what a beautiful animal he is:

And then the next photo was this:

It seems that ground has not yet become too hard for the Tawny Owl to attempt to catch some worms. Here is its classic head down, concentrating hard, worming posture:

And this is a particularly sweet little rabbit:

Over winter we were working hard coppicing the Hazel in the wood. These operations were prematurely curtailed and we are yet to clear the ground in the area that we were working. There are piles of logs and brash still sitting on the woodland floor that, by rights, should now be getting sunlight onto it and bursting forth with woodland flowers. It would be lovely to properly get back to the wood and finish this job off.

This week we had another walk in the nearby disused military firing range under the chalk cliffs. There were several clumps of Early Spider Orchids there:

There is a Kestrel nest high up on the cliffs in a hole in the chalk. This time we couldn’t see a bird on the nest, but we did see Kestrels on the cliffs. This one had rodent prey:

Back in the meadows, the Buttercup bonanza has probably now reached its wonderful peak.

A Chiffchaff has arrived from Africa and can be heard singing along in the hedgerows.

But this is not the only newly arrived bird that we have been hearing this week – the raucously loud and unmistakable calls of Peacocks were disturbing our peaceful English twittering on Wednesday evening.  They must have been roosting immediately below the meadows overnight because they were still calling from there at dawn on Thursday.  A quick search on the internet tells me that four Peacocks have escaped from a village just north of Deal. The owner didn’t clip their wings to allow them to roost in trees to be safe from Foxes. Two have been recaptured but the remaining two are still at large and they now have their own Facebook page and have been on the ITV news.

There is a lot of Broad Bodied Chaser activity at the ponds and eggs are being laid.

It is that time of year when countless St Mark’s Flies billow around the hedgerows with their legs distinctively dangling.

We stood and watched the predatory male Dance Flies, Empis tessellata, who catch the St Marks flies and hold them across their bodies awaiting a female.

When a female arrives, the male offers her the St Marks Fly as a gift and then mates with her as she eats it:

While we were watching this fascinating drama being played out under our noses in the hedgerow, we saw these very little mating Flies with the most amazing green eyes:

They are Celery Flies, Euleia heraclei, a species of Picture-winged Flies. After mating, eggs will be laid on host plants which will hatch and the larvae mine the leaves of the plants. They use a wide range of plants from the Apiaceae (Umbellifer) family – including Alexanders and there is a bountiful supply of those plants around here.

This is a nice Hoverfly with its bright yellow hairs:

I thought that this tiny little day-flying moth below was a Mint Moth but it turns out to be the similar Common Purple and Gold Moth:

Another really small Moth:

And this minuscule little thing, the Small Blue Butterfly:

This Slow Worm is in the process of shedding its skin. It is interesting to see this happening and that the older skin, still on the back part of its body, is a darker colour.

Looking to the skies, we saw our first Swifts on Thursday. Two of them, feeding over the meadows, and what a sight for sore eyes they were. By Friday, a pair were repeatedly flying by the Swift nest box and even briefly perched up on the bat box.

We have also had a visit from two Red Kites, mobbed by Crows. Visits from Kites seem to be getting more frequent and I wonder if their range has spread closer to us.

The meadows trail cameras have been coming up with some good stuff over the last few days:

May is the most magical of months. We were due to go on holiday this weekend and clearly this is not now happening. But the England we live in, the country that the people of seventy-five years ago had fought so hard for and sacrificed so much for, is a lovely place to be at any time but especially in May and June and we now wonder why we would want to be anywhere else.

 

 

So, here we now are in marvellous May. We are expecting some summer visitors from Africa shortly and have been busy preparing for them.

Actually, from the scritchy-scratchy song that we are hearing around the meadows, our first guests have already arrived. We didn’t need to do anything special for these ones – merely neglecting to tidy the hedgerows so that there is lots of wild, thorny growth does the trick  because that is exactly where they like to nest. Here is one of them, a Whitethroat, just back from sub-Saharan Africa:

I understand from nature Facebook groups that I follow that other expected visitors, Swifts, have been arriving back to breeding sites around Britain. We haven’t seen any here yet but the bungs have now been taken out of the nest box and the electronic Swift calls turned on to remind them about our box once they do return.  Lots of them inspected it last year and I am really hopeful that this year they will decide to nest.

Our third potential summer visitor is the Turtle Dove. We are now starting the Year Three of putting down supplementary feed from the beginning of May to the end of June using a special seed mix provided by Operation Turtle Dove and the RSPB.

Although, on paper, the meadows provide everything that a Turtle Dove might be looking for in a nesting site, we are yet to have any success in attracting them here. However, other declining farmland birds such as Linnets, Yellowhammer, Stock Dove and Grey Partridge have been visiting the seed and breeding locally and that too is an excellent result. We haven’t seen Grey Partridge since last year, though, but we remain ever hopeful.

 

We might not yet have seen Turtle Doves on the strip, but we do have two other species of Dove:

And we have many Wood Pigeon:

Seeing these Doves and Pigeon milling around on the strip is what might catch the eye of a passing Turtle Dove and intrigue it enough to fly down to investigate. Here is Day 1 of the seed going down and the Stock Dove are playing their part wonderfully.

It is such a privilege to be able to watch the Badger cubs as they start to learn how to be proper Badgers. They are becoming noticeably more confident every night.

There are definitely four cubs but they are in constant motion and difficult to get a good photo of. I don’t know if the single cub is currently grounded and kept escaping, but it got carried back to its sett three times last night, at 9pm, midnight and 3am:

The male, Scarface, is not allowed anywhere near the cubs at this stage of the proceedings and is living a solitary life at the fringes. As the days lengthen, he has been spotted out in daylight a few times.

After a long spell of dry and sunny weather, we have finally had some rain to refill the ponds and refresh the land.

 

At this time of year, the meadows are awash with Buttercups and it is impossible not to be cheered by them:

Small Copper and Red Admiral are two more Butterflies that have made their first appearances of the year this week.

May is a time when Slow Worms mate. During courtship, the male takes the female in his jaws and bites the back of her neck.

They then intertwine and start some lower body rhythmic waving before mating starts which can last ten hours. Whilst we are unlikely to catch the early parts of this ritual, we may be lucky to see the mating part since it lasts so long and so we shall now be routinely looking under our sampling squares to see what’s going on. There are sometimes a lot of Slow Worms under them:

I have been making an effort to photograph and identify Ladybirds and thus learn a bit more about them. But every one that I have seen so far this year has been a Harlequin, I’m afraid. This invasive species originating from Asia but introduced to Europe to control aphids on crops is really bad news because it outcompetes our native Ladybird species for food as well as eating their eggs and larvae.

The Harlequin is very variable but can be recognised by a white triangle right at the front.

When we first bought the meadows, it was probably a whole year before we even saw a House Sparrow here. Happily we now have lots:

A pair of House Sparrows are setting up their home in the House Martin Box and here they are, mating next to it. This involved around five quick mounts and dismounts.

It was all over quickly and the male went off into the chosen box:

Summer Starlings are another species that we didn’t see initially but we do now. Here is one disturbing a Green Woodpecker’s bath:

We have always had Crows though. Here is a rare tender moment between them:

We have always had Magpies as well. Too many actually. I see that Magpies are managing to get themselves into the middle cage that has a larger gauge than the other two to allow Blackbird-sized birds to get in. But I’m sure it is meant to be Magpie-proof:

There are a lot of Alexanders growing along some of the hedgerows but in one area of the second meadow, they are starting to encroach inwards. These robust plants are extremely good at self-seeding and, once established, are really difficult to pull out of the ground.

They are just finishing flowering and starting to set seed so we decided to cut them down with shears and take everything away so at least there won’t be any seed produced in this area this year although the root systems will be still in the ground. We wage a bit of an ongoing war with Alexanders.

For three weeks now, we have been putting out medicated jam sandwiches at dusk to help several of our Foxes that have mange. This needs to be done for at least six weeks and so we are halfway through the treatment. The one-eyed vixen has not missed a single day which is just as well because she really is in a bit of a state:

I hope that she is already getting better although we won’t be able to tell until her fur starts growing back.

I have come to look forward to taking the sandwiches out at dusk because she is almost always there first. This trail camera photo is just before I arrived and she is waiting on the pinnacle. It had been a rainy day:

When the next photo was taken, I had appeared at the gate into the paddock. As I then advanced on the pinnacle, she did retreat a bit further than this, but not much – she was wary but stood her ground:

And as I left, she was back for those jam sandwiches that she loves so much:

But we are having to constantly review our sandwich-deploying technique to ensure they go down the right throats. For instance, last night the one-eyed Fox was again waiting for me in the ant paddock. She ate a few here and then quickly followed me down to the wild pond for the ones I also put down there. However, after she went, the Magpie ate the rest of the sandwiches. Clearly I need to wait until it is darker and the birds have properly roosted.

But when she arrived down at the wild pond, it was only to find that the Badgers had come out early and were eating the sandwiches down there, forcing our girl to wait in the background until they were all eaten. If this happens again, I will start putting all the sandwiches out into the ant paddock where the Badgers don’t go until later into the night. It’s all very complicated.

A ferry was behaving oddly this week. It was anchored alongside us for several days in calm weather, although also making several short trips back to Dover during this time.

It is The Pride of Canterbury – a P&O ship used on the Dover-Calais route

After two or three days she set off for Leith near Edinburgh. She is one of two P&O ferries that are going to be safely stored in Leith docks for the rest of the lock down since P&O are now only operating a much reduced ferry schedule.

Here is another interesting vessel that sailed past this morning. This is Solitaire, a pipe layer.

Sometimes the Moon is so beautiful that I cannot resist trying to photograph it, usually with disappointing results that remind me that I need to get a tripod for my camera. This week, the new Moon was really close to the brightly shining Venus and we were out admiring the spectacle. I was quite pleased with this image of the moon, although I do still need to get that tripod…..