There was a shocking murder in Canterbury in 1170 when Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, was assassinated in the cathedral. In recognition of this, since medieval times the city’s coat of arms has depicted three choughs taken from the arms of Thomas Becket:

But it is also said that a crow, witnessing the killing, flew down and paddled in Thomas Becket’s blood, getting a red beak and legs as a result and becoming the first ever chough. So Canterbury, and Kent itself, has had a long association with the chough. Indeed, choughs were once common birds on Kent’s cliffs and chalk grasslands but they were driven to extinction by habitat loss and persecution more than two hundred years ago.

Last summer, after four decades of chalk grassland restoration in the Dover area, about ten choughs were released into the wild as part of a captive breeding programme. The plan going forward is to continue to release small family-sized groups of between six to twelve choughs every year for at least five years to establish a breeding population of around fifty birds.

There have been fortifications on the cliffs overlooking Dover since at least the Bronze Age. Dover Castle is now a large and impressive structure, managed by English Heritage, and we visited it this week:

The walls of Dover Castle encompass buildings dating back to wildly differing eras. The lower two-thirds of the structure on the right is a Roman lighthouse. There was a matching one on the cliffs at the other side of the Dover valley although little remains of that one today:

Dave and his father got great views of Dover Castle when they flew over in a helicopter back in 2015. The circular Inner Bailey contains the square Great Tower, originally built by King Henry II in the 12th century:

It was at the top of this Great Tower that I started to contentedly photograph the many jackdaws that were on the roofs of the surrounding Inner Bailey. No doubt they will be nesting in amongst the chimney pots before too long:

Dave then spotted that it was not just jackdaws there, but choughs as well:

We walked along the outer walls of the castle back to the car and passed through Peverell’s Tower, a one-bedroomed property available to rent through English Heritage which has a private roof terrace with very fine views out to sea and over Dover.

Back in the meadows we took a different approach to this year’s Big Garden Birdwatch, which has been held in January every year since 1979. Whereas previously we had watched the birds from one or two set positions for the hour, this year we roamed freely over the meadows with our binoculars in our hands. This did have the advantage that we flushed a woodcock, although it was disappointing to discover that this species wasn’t on the RSPB’s list and wouldn’t be counted by them. In the end we recorded ninety-eight birds, although admittedly forty-six of these were house sparrows. Magpies also claimed more than their fair share of the total with a group of fourteen of them loitering at the end of the second meadow:

This woodcock has put in several recent night-time appearances on the cameras and it’s likely to be the one we flushed during the count:

We didn’t see any bird of prey during the hour’s birdwatching but they have been around:

We had hoped to do a Big Garden Birdwatch in the wood as well, but in the event this didn’t happen and we got on with our list of winter jobs instead. One of the barn owl boxes had fallen forward:

It was quite a wrangle but Dave managed to get it secured back up again – ready now for occupation by nesting squirrels this spring, no doubt.

The tawny owls in the wood are being seen at the box every night although I am trying hard not to get excited. This happened last year as well but they ended up nesting elsewhere:

Every winter more overgrown goat willow stools collapse in the high winds. This is in an area of the wood that we rarely go to, but we might now do some coppicing to create a small clearing around this fallen tree to finish off our work for the winter:

The blushing bracket, Daedaleopsis confragosa, likes the fallen willow wood. It is pale brown when fresh but goes this beautiful red brown colour as it ages:

Being impatient for spring, I wanted to be reassured that it was on its way by seeing some snowdrops. I finish today with the slightly underwhelming snowdrop display at Goodnestone Park which we visited this week thinking it might be a good local place to see some:

The snowdrop season is only just beginning and there is still plenty of time to improve on this as we now step into February.

I have never before owned a bridge camera but the thought of having just one lightweight camera that can take close ups of invertebrates as well as zooming in on distant birds, and everything in between, is very alluring indeed.

This week I have bought a well-reviewed Sony RX10 bridge camera which can apparently handle anything from 24mm to 600mm all on its very own:

I also have this manual and am determined to learn how to properly use this new camera:

I’ve only just started to work my way through this book but so far so good

Before the storm of this weekend we drove a little way up the coast to the hide at the Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory scrape to put my new bridge camera through its paces. We hadn’t been there for ages:

It was a bitterly cold day and the scrape was frozen:

It has been very cold in the meadows as well:

But we were pleased that the ground was frozen hard on the day that the hedgerows were cut this week, so that the heavy tractor made less of a mess with its tyres.

There is about a kilometre of hedgerow surrounding and within the meadows but half of this has now matured into trees heavily covered in ivy and has not been maintained as a hedge for many years. The other half that we can still keep as a hedge is cut every two years.

As the tractor was working in the meadows, a buzzard flew in to see if whatever was going on had thrown up any opportunities for a meal:

This is probably the same buzzard seen on a different day:

When I looked at the trail cameras after the hedges were cut, the tractor had made many cameo appearances:

A pair of bullfinch have been coming to this baking tray for a few days now. This is an unusual species for the meadows, although a female bullfinch was ringed here two or three years ago. Male and female:

The male bullfinch is a most beautiful bird:

Numerous blackbirds are also appearing on the cameras, many of which will just be here for the winter, across from the colder parts of Europe:

One of them has fallen foul of a sparrowhawk though and won’t be leaving in the spring:

The blackcaps that are here in the winter have come from Central Europe and will also be returning there before long. They will be replaced by our breeding blackcaps who are currently seeing out the rest of the winter in North Africa:

Another seasonal visitor is this woodcock, escaping the extreme conditions of Finland and Russia at this time of year:

I don’t know where our yellowhammers go for the winter but they start reappearing in January to prepare for the breeding season and the first pair arrived back this week:

A fox coming into the meadows from the densely vegetated cliff:

I think this is the same fox and unfortunately it has mange:

It has been very cold in the wood as well:

Our winter work in the wood has been given a little boost by a woodsman who needed some hazel poles to do hedgelaying elsewhere. He has coppiced a row of twelve hazel stools and made a dead hedge at the back with what he doesn’t need. The poles he wants are still lying on the ground here, waiting for him to take them away to lay his hedge:

The tawny owls are showing interest in the box where they raised two chicks in 2022:

But, as usual, there is a lot of squirrel activity there as well:

It will be interesting to see what happens this spring.

The old cherry tree has produced a lot of resin in response to green woodpeckers drilling out a new hole last year:

I wonder what will happen here as well?

Things were pretty tempestuous as Storm Isha blew her way across the country this weekend. Another small tree came down across the access track to the wood but other than that we got off fairly lightly:

It was a welcome opportunity to stay inside and continue to learn about my new bridge camera. When the weather improves, I want to be ready to go out, camera in hand, and take some photos I am pleased with.

Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey is only an hour’s drive from home and last year we stayed in one of their shepherd’s huts in January and again in May. Both visits were so completely enjoyable that we are doing the same this year as well.

Thousands of waterfowl come to overwinter at Elmley and great flocks rise and fall over the marsh. It was wonderful to see such a density of birds in one place.

Elmley is known for its marsh harrier roost in the winter – last January there had been 110 of these birds of prey circling the reed beds at dusk, arriving from throughout northern Kent as the light starts to fade. On the night we stayed this week there were about 45 coming in to roost.

But perhaps the main draw for us, bringing us back to the reserve in the depths of winter, was the prospect of seeing owls.

There are also seven pairs of barn owls resident on the reserve. We took a walk at dusk and saw three different barn owls hunting in the rough grassland around us. The next morning we returned at first light and were delighted to again see three barn owls.

We went on a walking tour with the warden of the reserve and he showed us a structure in the glamping area that was used as a camp kitchen last summer:

But this winter the barn owls have been roosting in it, producing a lot of white birds muck and fresh black pellets:

We also saw a barn owl taking shelter in a kestrel box:

The old school house dates from the late 19th century when there was a small brick-making factory down on the banks of the Swale where the reed beds are today. The school is now in ruins but is home to one of the three pairs of little owls who are resident on the reserve:

We were only at Elmley for twenty-four hours but, in that short time, we have been reinvigorated by immersion in the wonders of the natural world.

We have returned home inspired and impatient for our next stay in May. The short-eared owls will be gone by then but there should be baby animals and invertebrates to compensate us for that.

We may have only gained about half an hour of daylight since the winter solstice, but I can really feel that difference. The tide has turned and we are forging full steam ahead towards spring here, although inevitably there will be some hiccups along the way.

As the end of the building project finally approaches, some building materials are left over that would be good to use in the meadows to create habitat:

The sun shone on Boxing Day and visiting family were lured outside to create an art installation-cum-invertebrate sanctuary with the roof tiles:

Before spring does arrive, there are a lot of jobs that need to be done. The nest boxes hadn’t been emptied in the meadows and so we started with that:

Over in the wood, the storm brought a small tree down across an access track:

There are far too many squirrels in the wood and they have been attacking the dormouse boxes. We went round cleaning these boxes out this week, so that they are ready for when the dormice reawaken in the spring. Unfortunately we discovered that seven of them are going to need to replacing:

There is much that we want to achieve in the wood before spring rolls in. In the marjoram grove, all the dogwood has now been cut down so that it won’t shade out the marjoram:

We have also been working on other previously cleared areas to ensure that they remain open and sunny:

I couldn’t resist looking under this large piece of corrugated tin left over from the pheasant-rearing days of the wood….

…and found a hibernating toad – a new species for the wood:

Two new treecreeper boxes have gone up:

It is going to be easy to get a trail camera on this one to see what is using it:

As usual at this time of year, the trail cameras have been very quiet, but they have shown that this sparrowhawk is visiting everyday:

And this is a very dark buzzard:

A bowl of hyacinths in the house is such comfort at this time of year, a harbinger of the warmer and lighter days of spring that are to come.

With the relentless north-easterly winds that have been howling across the meadows these last couple of days, this cannot come soon enough for us.

We will always remember 2023 as the year that we had the builders in. At the beginning of February they arrived to build a new garage, workshop and utility room and they are with us still – although we hope that we are nearly there now.

A lot of very chalky soil was excavated – perfect for growing wild flowers on, we realised:

We decided to ask them to create us a butterfly bank in the meadows with some of this soil. Its slopes would offer a range of different aspects to the sun, to suit the specific requirements of a wide variety of burrowing invertebrates. As well as that, the low nutrition soil would discourage grasses, enabling flowers to thrive and attract pollinators.

The weather in 2023 was very different to the terrible drought of 2022. Although it was still a hot year, with record temperatures in both June and September, there was a lot more rain. Here is the same early August meadow scene – in 2023 on the left and 2022 on the right:

Thankfully this year the ponds retained some water, the grass remained green and I didn’t have to worry about what the caterpillars of second brood butterflies were going to eat.

1. Birds

This autumn five birds of prey were regularly hunting in the meadows and I’m taking this as encouraging evidence that what we are doing here is making a difference.

The fifth bird of prey is the sparrowhawk. These birds are on the cameras every day:

The bird ringing highlight of the year was a juvenile nuthatch that flew into the ringers’ nets in August. In the spring and summer, a nuthatch will eat tree-dwelling insects but in the autumn and winter this changes to nuts and seeds. Their beak is strong enough to peck through hazel nuts but only once the nut has been held firm in the bark of a mature English oak. Our thin and chalky soils in this eastern part of Kent do not favour English oaks and consequently we do not get nuthatches here. Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory just up the coast has been keeping ringing records since 1952 and in all that time a nuthatch has not been ringed or recovered there.

It is always so enjoyable when there is a ringing session on in the meadows and we get a chance to see the animals in such detail, as well as talking birds with John and John, the ringers.

This summer there were several yellowhammer territories in the meadows. I wish we had taken the time to properly count and record them and will start to do that from now on. In our first year here, nearly a decade ago now, there were no yellowhammers in the meadows.

Another success of 2023 was that, after four years of playing loud swift calls into the skies between May and August, a pair of swifts nested here for the first time.

This year our ponds were adopted by a pair of mallards – presumably while they were laying their eggs.

2. Invertebrates

I love to photograph the invertebrates in the meadows and then attempt to identify them and learn about their often wacky lifestyles. This cluster fly, for instance, one of eight Pollenia species in the UK, is parasitic on earthworms and lays its eggs near worm burrows, the fly larvae then feeding on the worms.

The dark-edged bee-fly parasitises the nests of ground-nesting solitary mining bees – particularly Andrena species. She will flick her eggs towards the nest and, once those eggs hatch, the fly larvae will then crawl into the bee nest and live off the grubs.

Brown-lipped snail are hermaphrodites but the one on the right below has fired a sharp ‘love-dart’ at its partner prior to mating and this can still be seen sticking into it. Why some species of land snail do this is not yet completely understood but the dart does transfer chemicals that improve the chances of fathering young for the snail firing the dart.

We have a colony of small blue butterflies in the meadows. The female butterfly lays an egg into a kidney vetch flower and, by the time that egg hatches, the flower is going over. The caterpillars are cleverly disguised to look like the developing seed pods of the flower.

The wasp spider is the largest orb weaving spider in the UK (builders of spiral, wheel-shaped webs) and it is a grasshopper specialist. It creates its web low in the grasses and waits for a grasshopper to make a fatal mistake:

This little thing was in my kitchen in July and I eventually discovered that it was a cockroach larva (the two cerci sticking up at the end of the abdomen are a giveaway) – not one of our three native species but also not one of the horrible invasive species that need to live in our buildings because they can’t cope with the British climate. This cockroach, which I believe is the variable cockroach, has newly arrived in the UK and is very under reported but it does live outside, which was a huge relief. I subsequently found several more out in the meadows. They are very distinctive with that white band:

In September I then found one of the adults hiding in the workings of a trail camera:

Another unwelcome find was this enormous gypsy moth caterpillar tucked away in the back of a trail camera that was strapped to an apple tree. It was about 5cm long – enormous – and you wouldn’t ‘t want those hairs to touch your skin. Really beautiful colours though:

This is an amazing little moth though. It is the twenty-plume moth. Each of the two forewings and two hind wings are split into six deeply-divided feathery plumes. This is actually a total of twenty-four plumes.

My last invertebrate is the great green bush-cricket. Including the ovipositor, this monster was about 7cm long. We had a shock to discover that something so enormous was living in the meadows and we had had no idea:

3. Other things

The meadow grasses grew noticeably much taller in 2023 than in the drought of 2022 – perhaps double the height

The hay pile resulting from the September cut has never been so large:

Despite not letting a single alexander set seed for the last two years, our alexander problem seems to be getting worse rather than better. Here is the cliff-line path in March:

This year we decided to dig them all out rather than just cut off their flowers. This was a huge job and we toiled for hours out in the meadows in March. The problem is that they have a large carrot underground and are difficult to get out cleanly. But I can confidently say that, yet again, no alexander set seed here in 2023. Surely eventually all our work will pay off and the alexander situation will improve.

At the end of February the annual frog spawning went off without any major drama. The herons generally behaved themselves, the spawn was not laid in too shallow water and the pond went on to have water in it all summer giving the tadpoles a chance to mature.

This male smooth newt was vigorously wagging his tail at a female – I had always hoped that I would see this courtship dance one day and, in April, I finally did:

It was also lovely to see this great heap of slow worms under one of the sampling squares in May:

There is no doubt that there were many more rabbits in the meadows than in previous years:

This population growth has suited the foxes as well as producing some rabbit-grazed pockets in the meadows where the grass is kept really short and offers a different type of habitat.

I had forgotten how lovely the meadows are in May when all the buttercups are out:

And that finishes my review of the meadows for 2023. A new year has just begun and there is much to anticipate in 2024. Will the badgers have cubs this year? Will the swifts return to the box? Will we ever see that barn owl again? I am so looking forward to finding out the answers to these questions and to many more as the year plays out. A Happy New Year to all.