Here in the meadows the foxes love a tasty pear or two and late September is the time that the pears ripen on the trees and the fun begins.

Last year, after they had plucked all the fruit from the lower branches, they went climbing up into the tree for more:

This year, they haven’t started climbing yet but, if they do, then we should know all about it:

Badgers are also very partial to a pear but they are at a disadvantage with their short little legs and have to rely on drops:

Jays, Magpies and Crows are very interested too, pecking away at the fruit by day:

In the image below, the pear on the right went rotten first and, because it was touching the perfectly healthy left hand pear, the fungus passed across and produced this amazing effect.

Whilst all this pear mania is going on, the apples are lying mostly untouched on the ground:

I did, however, cut a few apples in half and spread them on the ground in front of a camera and a group of six Magpies came down to eat them. We have noticed in the past that birds are much more interested in apples if they are first cut up and this seems odd since surely most birds’ beaks could easily pierce the skin of an apple?

We willingly donate all the pears on this tree to wildlife because, although we do like pears ourselves, we like seeing the animals enjoying them more.

We are now certain that this is the male of the pair of Herring Gulls who have adopted the meadows as their territory throughout the year. The female is colour ringed and easy to spot but we can also recognise this male by his behaviour (which amusingly includes dive-bombing the dog) and it is only ever him that turns up with their youngster. We do see the female as well, but only on her own.

We have enjoyed observing this pair of Gulls this year but would like to better understand them and an out-of-print book has been recommended to us. Published in 1953 but apparently ageing well, this book was written by the Nobel-prize winning Niko Tinbergen and is a study of Herring Gulls’ social behaviour. It sounds very interesting and we have got a second-hand copy on its way:

Now that some of the meadows has had its annual cut, we are seeing much more Kestrel activity. A trail camera captured one flying with its distinctive long, thin wings:

There is a lot of variation within the population of Common Lizards that we have here. We saw this beautiful green one this week:

This is so very different to the one we had seen the week before, yet they are the same species:

We also saw a different species on the Isle of Wight last week, the Wall Lizard, although there is also a population of these non-native lizards near us at Folkestone:

Other photos from the meadows this week:

In the woodland, I did a double-take when I saw this photo of a fox who looked so much like the Old Gentleman, who has left a fox-shaped hole in my heart:

Owls and Buzzards have been using the wood baths in this long spell of dry weather that we have been having this September:

I am pleased to have had a few recent sightings of Marsh Tit:

I like this photo of a mouse trying to reach the water. Surely it is close to its tipping point?

There have been lots of visits of both adults and two juvenile Bullfinch to this pond:

Finally, I often give Magpies a hard time in this blog but now they have found a way to give me their response:

One of the trail cameras got bumped sideways this week so that it was pointing at the hedgerow that runs alongside the feeding cages. Throughout that day, it took photos of a pair of rats emerging from the vegetation and venturing out across open ground to eat the bird seed:

But I now realise that these animals are risking their lives every time they come out into the open:

I was a bit surprised to see that corvids are actively hunting rodents like this. I had presumed that our rat population was held in check by foxes:

This reminded me that we have also once seen a Weasel with a young rat:

Although we have rats, we have never had a rat problem because there are so many things out there that want to eat them.

At this time of year, the hedgerows are laden with fruits and seeds such as Sloes, Rose hips, Dogwood berries, Blackberries, Old Man’s Beard and Haws.

Many of the wild roses have these Robin’s Pincushions, or Rose Bedeguar galls.

Some parts of the hedgerows are heavy with mature ivy which comes into flower in September. Ivy nectar is very good quality with 49% sugar and is popular with a wide range of late flying insects. When the ivy is in the sun you can actually hear it humming from a distance away, such is the number of visiting bees, wasps and flies. The Ivy Bee is an ivy specialist that times its emergence to coincide with the ivy flowering and there are currently thousands of them working the hedgerows in the meadows:

We also have a young hedgerow that was planted in January 2020. It has had a bad start in life – after battling the drought of summer 2020, unfortunately it has become completely swamped by the surrounding lush vegetation during this wet summer. We are cross with ourselves for not acting sooner and there have been quite a few losses along its length, but on the whole it is just about hanging on in there. The tractor has now been run along either side to properly reveal it and we are weeding between the saplings.

We are going to apply a bark mulch this autumn to act as both a weed suppressant and moisture retainer which will give the new hedgerow a helping hand through next summer.

Whilst we were weeding this fledgling hedgerow, we found a very large and beautiful spider and brought her back to have a proper look. She is a European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus), an orb web spider with a distinctive white cross on her back. These are centimetre squares to give you an idea of her size – she was big:

We returned her to the hedgerow where we found her.

There is bad news – the tractor has broken down! We think the belts driving the cutting deck have burnt out. Unfortunately the earliest it can go off to be repaired is the end of September meaning that this beautiful weather is going to waste whilst most of the second meadow remains uncut. We now have to hope for a dry October.

But in the meantime we are getting on with other jobs. We cut this small section of the first meadow very short with the lawn mower…

…and sowed some meadow flower seed. I now see that the EM6F mixture for chalky soils that I have used in the past has got wild parsnip seeds in it. That plant is a thug and persona non grata here these days and so I went for EM2F instead which still contains a variety of lovely plants but without the parsnip.

In a different section, also cut very short, I have laid some Lesser Knapweed seed heads that were harvested from an area where they were growing strongly. Hopefully, in this way, we get seeds for free:

One morning I found an old rusty battery up on the strip and wondered how it had arrived. But then I looked at the photos on the trail camera:

There is folklore around Magpies collecting shiny things but, on doing a quick search on the internet now, I see that this has largely been debunked by scientific studies. So what is going on with this battery then?

This Magpie below had some sort of stick in its beak:

Then it dangled the stick down in its foot:

The Bird Ringer came and spent a peaceful morning here with his nets, catching and ringing a selection of warblers on their way south.

The birds tend to come through in waves and, as usual this year, the Willow Warblers were ahead of the Chiffchaffs and have already mostly gone. The Chiffchaff wave is just beginning. These two species of birds look similar and I use the fact that Chiffchaffs have dark legs and Willow Warblers have pale ones to help tell them apart. However, apparently this is not true in all instances.

One way to categorically distinguish between them is to look at their primary wing feathers:

On a Chiffchaff wing, counting the little short feather at the front as number 1 and working backwards, there are six feathers that do not have any feather to the left of the shaft as you reach their tip. The technical term is immargination, or lacking a margin. Chiffchaffs have six feathers that are immarginated at the tips and Willow Warblers have but five. This distinction is probably only of relevance to ringers, though, and wouldn’t be any help whatsoever when viewing through a pair of binoculars.

This young Blackcap was a very feisty little bird. His cap has only recently turned black and the remnants of the brown head that he would have had as a juvenile can still be seen just above his beak.

He also had captivating white lower eyelash feathers:

Some other photos from this week:

In my university days back in the early 80s, I remember that slow cookers, house plants and rumtopfs were really popular amongst us students. Houseplants are now triumphantly back in fashion in this new century, but slow cookers and rumtopfs still languish in relative obscurity.

Although I liked the idea of a rumtopf, I’m not sure I ever actually used it back then so I decided it was time to finally give it a go this year.

As different fruits are harvested through the summer, you cut them into bite sized pieces and layer them into the rumtopf with a sprinkling of sugar. I have used our own orchard fruits but I have also added pineapple and nectarines to see how they fare too. With every added layer, rum is poured in so that the fruit is just covered. Then, by Christmas, it should all be nicely matured and you can start eating it – the recipe I read suggested you spoon it over ice cream although perhaps it would also go well with rice pudding for some winter comfort.

I have also taken advantage of what the hedgerow has to offer and made a 2021 vintage sloe gin. Just one day old and already the colour has started to infuse into the gin:

We shall look forward to drinking this in a year’s time.

Last weekend we spent two nights in a woodland cabin in Norfolk, close to the wild and lovely Yare river that heads east from Norwich and enters the sea near Great Yarmouth.

It was so restful to tip back in those comfortable chairs on the deck of the cabin and contemplate the sky through the rustling treetops. We have resolved to try to reproduce this in a small way in our own wood back home and I have ordered two similar chairs to facilitate this.

One of our favourite reserves, the Ted Ellis reserve at Wheaten Fen, is on the banks of the Yare:

Although now into September, the reserve was still thronging with invertebrate life.

I love the round tower churches of East Anglia and I understand from the Round Tower Churches Society that one hundred and eighty of them still survive there.

One of the loveliest gravestones I have ever seen was in the graveyard of this church in Fritton:

Now that we are back from Norfolk, we urgently need to get going with the annual cutting and clearing away of the meadows before autumn progresses much further. The plants and grasses have to be dry so that they don’t stick to the tractor – but is there going to be a sufficiently favourable weather window to get all this work done? I certainly hope so.

A pair of breeding Magpies will hold a territory of about twelve acres all year round. But the number of breeding territories is a limiting factor meaning that twenty-five to sixty percent of Magpies do not breed because they don’t have a territory. These non-breeding birds form a flock with a home range of about fifty acres and perhaps this is one such flock that we saw in the meadows this week:

Here in the meadows this summer we did have an active Magpie nest in a copse of trees and young were successfully fledged:

These young birds stay in their parents territory until September or October when they go off and join the non-breeding flock which feed and roost together. A high percentage of the young birds fail to make it through their first winter but, if they do survive, then they are likely to live for about three years.

Until the mid 19th century, Magpies were very common in Britain and they were popular with the farmers because they ate the insects and rodents that harmed the crop.

But from then until the First World War, heavy persecution from gamekeepers caused their population to plummet. Since the second World War, though, numbers have increased and in fact trebled from 1970 to 1990, helped by the birds moving more into urban areas away from persecution and where there is plenty of food. The population has been relatively stable since 1990 suggesting that they have now reached their ecological equilibrium.

I have found it helpful researching and understanding these birds a bit more because I am not very fond of Magpies. They strut around like sixth form prefects with all the power gone to their heads and they just seem to be too successful here. Their biggest crime in my eyes is the way they predate songbird eggs and nestlings. However, the BTO analysed thirty-five years of its bird monitoring records and found that songbird numbers were no different in places where there were lots of Magpies to where there were few. Availability of food and suitable nesting sites are probably the main factors limiting songbird populations rather than the density of their predators.

Actually they are indisputably beautiful birds:

Here is a Magpie with a Hawthorn berry. I am always interested to see which berries get eaten quickly and which are less popular – Hawthorn berries invariably go first. Sloes on the Blackthorn bushes seem to hang around until last, often lasting right through to the next spring.

We have planted a lot of Guelder Rose trees in the meadows because we had noticed elsewhere that the berries were very popular with all sorts of winter thrushes and, excitingly, Waxwings. The Guelder Roses in the meadows are now laden with a heavy crop of berries this autumn, ready for the thrushes’ arrival in the country shortly. We are yet to see a Waxwing here but perhaps this year will be the one.

In the meadows, there are three of these log structures built for beetles. The logs have been dug deep into the ground and are in the shade so that they don’t dry out and we hope that beetle larvae will now be living on the rotting underground wood:

This week the badgers provided us with a bit of evidence that this might indeed be the case by excavating around the base of the stack, presumably to get at the beetle grubs:

Spurred on by this apparent success, we plan to bring back additional logs from the wood this autumn and build a few more of these stacks.

Some other photos from the meadows this week:

Over in the wood, a Tawny Owl has been visiting the shallow bath on a few nights recently:

It has also been perching up by one of the Tawny Owl nest boxes, although sadly showing no apparent interest in the box itself:

I finish with the breaking news that the last two days since our return from Norfolk have been hot and dry and the first meadow is now almost finished. A few areas are left uncut each year on a rotational basis:

Now, on with the second one before this weather breaks!