Although February in the ponds is all about frogs, now that it is March it is the turn of the smooth newts to take centre stage. The female newts are full of eggs:

The males are decked out in their breeding finery and are very attentive to the females in the hope that they will be chosen to fertilise the eggs.

The males do look pretty fantastic at this time of year:

Back in 2020 we fished a couple of the males out of the pond to have a better look at them:

They look too exotic to be in an East Kent pond.

This week we went down to the pond one evening to see what the newts were getting up to. They were noticeably less wary in the dark and this female was cruising around close to the water surface:

Although newts can absorb oxygen through their skin, the amount of oxygen they get from this is usually insufficient and they do need to surface from time to time for a gulp of air. Depending on their activity levels and the water quality and temperature, newts can stay underwater anywhere from five minutes to several hours.

The pond has several green corrugated squares at the margins giving protection to frogs against herons. At this time of year these squares are completely submerged and create an arena for us to see whats going on:

A few male frogs were still patiently waiting in the pond at night in case there are any late-arriving females that they can claim as their own:

There is a lot that I don’t understand about the anatomy of snails. This is a great pond snail, floating upside-down on the water surface. I can see its mouth at the front but was surprised to also see a siphon on its side sucking air in:

It seems that great pond snails do breath air into their single lung, although if they can’t reach the surface such as when the pond is frozen, they can flood their lung with water and it will function as a gill.

The blackthorn is out in flower in the meadows, with the enticing promise of a crop of sloes later in the year to make sloe gin:

We are looking forward to seeing what happens this spring with the three new chalk butterfly banks that were created last autumn out of diggings from our buildings works:

A March rainbow over the allotment this afternoon:

Slow worms are congregating in ever increasing numbers under the sampling squares:

With all this recent rain, at least the ground is soft for the spring mining bees to dig out their tunnels. The first tawny mining bee seen this year:

A pair of rosemary beetles on some lavender in the garden. I hadn’t realised that they had flanged leg segments:

The gingham skirt of a sparrowhawk:

The buzzard has been back:

A crow with an unpleasant bit of carrion:

And this is an unusual visitor to the meadows, a red-legged partridge:

The primroses are out in the wood and are being visited by bee-flies:

You can see the fly’s halter here. Flies only have a single pair of wings – their ancestral hind wings have been modified into these club-shaped halteres. These oscillate in flight like a gyroscope, giving information to the fly about its position in space:

This group of small but beautiful beetles caught my eye:

In 2022 we had a camera on a fox den in the wood and got some wonderful photos:

I have kept a trail camera on this burrow ever since in case the foxes return, but at the moment a sweet young rabbit is living down the hole:

But is it actually safe down the burrow for this little Easter bunny?

Every night badgers investigate down the hole:

And foxes are also very interested:

There was a photo of a different young rabbit standing at this hole last April and, a minute later, a buzzard had flown down onto it:

A rabbit faces all sorts of hazards every day and it is not good for my anxiety levels to get too invested in the safety of this one. On a more relaxing note, blackbirds have been collecting leaves for their nests at the entrance of the hole:

My nephew has lived for a few years now in Boulder, Colorado and he took this photo there of a different type of blackbird – a red-winged blackbird:

There is nothing like a sunny March day after a long, dark winter to ignite my gardening enthusiasm. I have been out there weeding the beds, sorting out my pots and digging up the sea of alexanders coming up in the meadows, until my body screams at me to stop. I love this time of year, full of so much promise. Surely this is the year that I won’t take my eye of the ball and the garden will stay looking fabulous all summer? Well probably not, but I will definitely try to make it happen and so much does depend on the weather…

We are part of a group who are interested in encouraging wildlife on their land and, this week, a group of us visited a wood that is owned by some fellow members. We were accompanied by three representatives from the Forestry Commission who spoke to us about tree health and woodland management, as well as what grants and support are available to plant and maintain a wood.

Our paths hadn’t crossed with the Forestry Commission before and we found them very helpful and interesting. We now hope to arrange a visit to our own wood by the East Kent Forestry Commission officer to discuss how we might better manage it.

The wood that we visited this week was very lovely, even at this time of year. I was very envious of the mature trees that they have there:

Although I envied the mature trees and orchids in the wood, I would not want the fallow deer population that they have. We don’t have any deer in our wood and I hadn’t realised that they eat the fresh hazel shoots that regrow after coppicing, meaning that regeneration is badly affected. This has to be bad news for dormice.

About fifteen years ago we drove one of our sons to Ghent in Belgium for a rowing competition. Although we didn’t get much of a chance to explore back then, we did notice that it was a beautiful medieval city and thought we would like to return one day for a proper look around. It has taken us a while but this week we got ourselves onto a ferry to Dunkirk and drove to Ghent to stay for a few days:

There was plenty to see and do in Ghent to keep us happily occupied for the couple of days we were there. Particularly memorable was this large room in the STAM museum filled with a birds eye view of the city:

We spent ages walking over the map and minutely inspecting it. The way the railway line expands out at one point was pretty incredible, I thought:

Once we were back in Kent I went through the trail cameras to see what had been going on whilst we were away:

I want to finish today with La Plaine au Bois memorial that we visited on the way back from our Belgium trip this week. In May 1940 the British Army had been forced to retreat and were being evacuated out of France at Dunkirk. Some British units were tasked with delaying the German forces as long as they could to give more time for the 330,000 British troops to get onto ships and safely home. These units had been told to fight to the last bullet.

A group of about a hundred men mainly from the Warwickshire Regiment had been holding back the Germans at Wormhoudt, a village a few miles from Dunkirk. Eventually they ran out of ammunition, surrendered, and became the captives of an elite German SS Division, II Battalion of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, who had been Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards earlier in the war. The Germans herded them into a small barn and then threw grenades in. The barn was also machine-gunned and anyone still alive after that was commanded to come out to be shot. Eighty-nine of the British prisoners of war were killed but six somehow managed to survive and were taken to hospital by the regular German soldiers.

Although it was known which German Battalion carried out this massacre, the men involved were never identified and no one stood trial after the war for this appalling crime.

I left La Plaine au Bois feeling shaken and very emotional and my thoughts have been returning to it ever since. Apart from their own terror and agony, these men were sons and brothers, husbands and fathers and every single one would have been loved and mourned back home. It is certainly a very fitting memorial to just one of the many atrocities that happened in the war and it feels very important that these things should never be forgotten.

When I was a child I wanted to keep a capybara as a pet and enthusiastically started to draw up plans to convert the back garden of our family home into a wetland for it to live in. But this was only ever fanciful – I had no idea how to source or look after the World’s largest rodent from South America and my parents would never have sanctioned the conversion of their Berkshire garden into swampy capybara habitat. Many decades on, I still retain a soft spot for these lovely animals and was delighted to find one amongst The Natural History Museum’s exhibits on a visit up to London this week:

As well as the capybara, I came across other intriguing animals such as this giant golden mole from South Africa:

I recall being mesmerised by this dodo from Mauritius when I visited the museum as a child. The species had been hunted to extinction by the late seventeenth century:

I also remember being both repulsed and fascinated by this Victorian case packed with so many species of stuffed hummingbirds:

The beautiful Natural History Museum building was built in the mid nineteenth century as a ‘cathedral to nature’:

Hope, a 25m blue whale, now hangs above the visitors’ heads in the main hall:

I was at the Natural History Museum this week primarily to meet my children and together visit the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2023 Exhibition. As usual, the standard of the photographs was pretty amazing and can be seen on the Natural History Museum’s website here:

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/gallery

This year I find myself disagreeing with the judges over what the overall winning photo should have been. I would have chosen this fantastic image by Agorastos Papatsanis of Greece:

It is really easy to get ourselves up to London these days with the high speed trains now operating between East Kent and London St Pancras. Whenever we do go up, we always enjoy ourselves and wonder why we don’t do it more often.

Back in the meadows, frog spawning happens a little later in the garden pond than in the others and is still ongoing:

But it has been all over for a while in the wild pond and the tiny tadpoles have been developing within the jelly:

In fact, this week the tadpoles have hatched and congregated together to form black masses surrounded by aureoles of empty jelly:

Whilst we were looking into the pond, it was surprising to see two small collections of leaves moving around quite quickly in otherwise still water:

I was able to photograph the second protective case from the side showing more of the caddisfly larva itself:

We are constantly amazed by the life going on the ponds, most of it unseen by us

Some slow worms came above ground on 7th March, although I expect they reserve the right to go straight back down again should things deteriorate weatherwise. Two beefy males here:

A tiny neonate slow worm that would have hatched last autumn:

So far this year, it is only the corvids that have been starting to nest. Here a crow is carrying a stick that will surely not be of much use:

The magpies have been collecting mud for their nest:

All this mud collecting leaves them in a bit of a state and in need of a bath:

Both of the magpies below are ringed. Last year the pair nesting in the meadows flew into the nets and were ringed, and it looks like they are our breeding pair this year as well:

Although at the moment there are also some others around:

It’s not always the big bully birds on the perches. Sometimes smaller birds use them too:

And it’s always exciting to see a tawny in the meadows

A very normal sight here is for the back half of the dog to be sticking out of this badger hole. There is a camera trained onto the hole and, when I look through its photos, so many are of the dog’s rear end:

But some of the photos are of the badgers themselves:

The woodcock still remain in the wood for now, although they will be leaving soon to breed in Finland and Russia:

The redwing also have not left yet:

Squirrels are very happily ensconced in the tawny owl box and sadly there have been no recent sightings of owls. Other birds do come and peer in from time to time though:

A heavily pregnant vixen:

Any elder that there is in the wood usually has the jelly ears fungus on it:

I finish today with the very appealing capybara that one of my daughters gave me for my birthday this week:

Unlike its larger South American counterparts, this little capybara will be no trouble whatsoever to look after whilst still bringing me lots of pleasure.

This week we spent a day learning all about hedges – their importance and their history as well as how to plant, manage and rejuvenate them.

After the Second World War, farmers were incentivised to dig up hedgerows in order to maximise the area available for food production and a lot of our hedges were lost over the next few decades. These days, though, it is recognised quite how vital hedges are for all sorts of reasons and the Government has recently increased its funding for farmers to plant new hedges as well as to rejuvenate existing ones. In fact, it has set a target to help create 45,000 miles of new hedging to be planted in the UK by 2050.

A good hedge for wildlife will have a nice mix of tree species, it will be dense at the bottom with a good height and width and will have structural complexity. But, over time, the trees making up the hedge will grow upwards and will tend to lose density at the base, by which point it has lost much of its value to wildlife.

For centuries the hedges in this country were managed on a cycle – they were planted and left to grow for ten years and then they were laid. Hedge laying involves cutting partway through the stems about 5cm off the ground which stimulates new shoots right at the base. The stems are then bent over and secured with stakes and binders. They will still go on growing in their new diagonal position and there is now also new growth coming straight up from the low cuts.

The new growth that is generated at the base represents the new generation of the hedge and this will now grow strongly. If the hedge is trimmed every so often – each time leaving everything a little bit higher and wider than the last trim – it can then be forty years until it becomes necessary to lay the hedge again and begin the cycle once more.

But about sixty years ago, the hedge management cycle almost completely stopped in this country – hedges were no longer being laid but were only ever trimmed from then on. It is estimated that by now only 48% of the UK’s hedgerows are in good structural health. The rest are in need of rejuvenation but only a very few traditional hedge layers are still working.

The People’s Trust for Endangered Species has a Healthy Hedgerows App that helps to classify the state of an existing hedge using this scale:

It was really interesting to walk with Megan and assess the hedges that we came across on the farm. There was also evidence to be seen that some of the old hedges had been laid long ago:

We have come away from the day with a much greater appreciation and understanding of hedgerows. We don’t yet know what we are going to do about that overgrown cliff-line hedge – probably nothing actually – but what we are going to do straight away is prune the 85m of new hedgerow that was planted a few years ago. It has been badly affected by a couple of drought summers since planting and there has really not been much growth. But a prune now will encourage everything to be much bushier as we go forward.

John and John, the bird ringers, have managed to dodge the rain and the wind and get a ringing session in – both in the meadows and also in the wood:

John was up at Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory for a meeting this week and spotted this short-eared owl as he was leaving. Luckily he had his camera with him:

The trail cameras have been fairly quiet. The buzzard has continued to hunt from the top of the haypile:

I have cropped the next two photos by the same amount to show the large difference in size between a sparrowhawk on the left and the buzzard on the right:

I am seeing magpies perched up with sticks in their beaks although I still have not located this years nest:

There have been some nice fox photos:

My brother and sister-in-law came to stay for a few days this week and one day we walked south along the cliffs between the village of Kingsdown and the Port of Dover. The weather was mostly pretty awful but, even through the rain, they could appreciate what a lovely stretch of coastline it is:

This seven-mile stretch of coastline is mostly owned by the National Trust these days and they have been working hard to return it to the glorious wildlife-rich habitat it once was. If we had done this walk in the summer we may well have seen clouds of blue butterflies, various species of orchid, corn buntings, yellowhammer, choughs and peregrine falcons. But in the cold and rain of late February we saw none of these things and I am looking forward to doing this walk again on a lovely spring morning before too long.