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.
It is difficult to imagine how anything could find a Christmas tree tasty but a goat at a local garden centre was busy recycling one in the early days of the New Year
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:
It was actually great fun and we now have an appealing new habitat feature. It will need to be strimmed around once the grass starts to grow and will be interesting to see how it develops over time
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:
Every year we find nests that have incorporated fluff from the dog’s footballsWe have a few of these wren boxes tucked into the hedgerowsVery pleasing to see that wrens used this one last yearThere is actually a kestrel box and camera hidden away like Sleeping Beauty’s castle amongst all that ivyClearing away some of the ivy to reveal the entrance of the box and removing the camera. We don’t think kestrels will ever use this box because they actually have great nesting opportunities in the nearby chalk cliffs. A stock dove was successfully fledged from this box in 2020 but since then we lost track of what was going on in there.The stock dove chick was an odd-looking little thing. Even its mother seemed a bit concernedFeeding crop milk to the chickJohn and John came to ring the chick in August 2020. It still looked pretty peculiar with its feathers in their keratin sheavesWe noticed this natural nest only twenty centimetres off the ground right by the path. Although very obvious now, it was completely hidden by leaves in the summer and we hadn’t known it was thereThe little owl box had wild honey bees in it in 2022. Consequently it was not cleared out last winter because the bee colony would have been trying to survive the winter in there. Unfortunately, however, no bee reemerged the next springWasps then arrived in the box in the summer of 2023 but only stayed for a whileAfter all this recent activity involving stinging insects, we felt a bit nervous when finally opening up the box this week. It was packed full of old honeycombThis has all been cleared out nowWe ended up with a reasonable haul of old nests of varying sorts in the wheelbarrow. We did find several mouse nests in the boxes as wellA tawny owl in the meadows, coming in for the first touch down of the yearThe nearby town of Deal grew up to service ships that were anchored in the protected waters of The Downs. These sailing ships needed to await favourable winds to carry them off around The British Empire. Although wind direction is less of an issue these days, The Downs were once again providing shelter this week as several ships saw out a storm alongside the meadows
Over in the wood, the storm brought a small tree down across an access track:
Trees heavily shrouded in ivy like this are vulnerable in high windsThere was a squirrel drey hidden amongst the ivyAlthough there are lots of dreys high in the trees in the wood, I’d never seen one up close beforeThe empty drey was very cosy with a snug inner cavity and very thick walls of leaves and grass.
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:
A dormouse box that has been chewed by squirrelsA lovely dormouse nest that was in one of the boxes
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:
Because we do this job every winter, the regrowth of the dogwood is thin and whippy and is really easy to cut by waving a hedge trimmer around. Picking it all up, though, remains just as tiring as usual
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.
Love the art instillation for insects.
And those hyacinths are very pretty. Just the touch of colour to cheer the new year up.
It’s the scent of them as well as you walk into the kitchen. So very, very uplifting