We have set up a camera in the wood, looking at an old cherry tree that has been a favourite nesting site for woodpeckers in recent years. Collecting the card from it this week, I immediately noticed that the ground below the tree was covered in wood chippings:

It looked like further excavation work had been going on in a low hole in the tree that was first dug out last year and I was filled with anticipation to see what would be on the SD card. Although great spotted and green woodpeckers had both been inspecting this hole over the last couple of weeks, it turns out that it is the green woodpeckers that have now claimed it for themselves:

As the birds peck away at the wood within the cavity, all the wood chippings need to be brought out in their beaks:

There were lots of photos of this laborious process on the SD card. Whenever I could see the moustache of the bird, it was always the female that was doing the work, but I often couldn’t tell and can’t say for sure that the male wasn’t involved.

Woodpeckers are unusual amongst birds in that they have four toes, numbers 2 and 3 of which point forwards and numbers 1 and 4 point backwards. This is no doubt to help them on trees, although treecreepers and nuthatches, who also spend much of their time on tree trunks, have the more normal configuration of three toes forward and only one backwards.

Great spotted woodpeckers are still peering into the hole but I think that they have lost their chance:

I have read that green woodpeckers drill two holes, one that is used for egg-laying whilst the other is for sleeping. I hope that this low hole is where the baby woodpeckers are going to be but we shall have to see how things progress. There are multiple old woodpecker holes in this tree that could be reused and so both of their holes could easily be on this same tree

Nesting is going on all over the wood. In the foreground of this next photo, a blackbird has a beak of nesting material whilst a song thrush is collecting sticks behind her:

We quickly looked in some of the bird boxes, all of which had nests under construction. This nest has badger fur as its soft lining:

The trail camera looking at the woodpecker tree is also capturing other animals as they make their way along the woodland track behind the tree:

A hare is not a typical woodland animal but one has been spending some time here all the same. They are mainly nocturnal and I think this one is sheltering amongst the safety of the trees during the day:

A massive buzzard visits a woodland pond:

The primroses and bluebells in the wood are gradually giving way to bugle, wild strawberry and speedwell, all very popular with a wide variety of invertebrates. When the sun shines, the glades and rides are now alive with mining bees, their predators and many other insects – but I’m finding most are difficult to photograph and identify. But there is no mistaking this ashy mining bee, Andrena cineraria:

Having just completed a Field Studies Council online course on Discovering Bees, I am now trying to identify some different types of bees when I’m out and about. East Kent is a hotspot for rare bees and it is good to keep one’s eyes open at all times. I am also attempting to make more of an effort with hoverflies this year, and there were several of these slim and elegant Sphaerophoria scripta males in the wood:

Across in the meadows, the male mallard has returned with his mate and so I presume that egg laying is on-going. They are visiting both ponds:

There has been another sighting of a jackdaw in the meadows. We see them so rarely here:

About fifteen years ago we visited Costa Rica and were delighted to see Resplendent Quetzals – astounding looking birds that live off the wild avocado trees that grow in the Costa Rican cloud forest:

When I saw this next photo, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing but my mind immediately leapt to the Resplendent Quetzal:

But it was merely yet another photo of a magpie in the meadows, with its tail casting a long shadow on the pole.

Magpies like to stick close to all the predators that hunt in the meadows, and here one is keeping an eye on a sparrowhawk:

Magpies also hang around the buzzard that has been hunting from the hay pile through the winter. We haven’t seen the buzzard in the meadows recently but a male blackbird has been using the hay pile as a high perch from which to fill the meadows with his beautiful singing:

No baby badger has yet appeared on the trail cameras yet, but it has been so cold. It surely won’t be long now.

For the last couple of years I have been volunteering at nearby Walmer Castle and I love their kitchen garden in April:

I also want to include this photo of a pair of sweet robins that I took on a trip up to Buckinghamshire this week:

We had the THV Galatea anchored so close to the house on two nights this week that I could hear her generators through the night. She works for Trinity House, responsible for lighthouses and marine navigation aids around the coasts of England and Wales. We often see her here when she is maintaining the lightships that guard the infamously dangerous Goodwin Sands just offshore from the meadows:

She is such an odd shape with a very tall bow and nothing at the back:

The Galatea at dawn as she prepares to go off for her day’s work to to keep the seas safe for shipping:

On Monday evening there was drama when an air ambulance landed on the shingle immediately below the house:

Apparently there were more normal ambulances there as well. I do not know what was going on but, whatever it was, someone was in dire straits indeed. I hope it worked out well for them.

Where has April gone? We long for spring all through the dark days of winter and then it speeds by in a flash. May is perhaps my favourite month of all and, in an attempt to slow it down, I am planning to get out as much as possible to notice and appreciate it.

Britain’s lovely native hazel dormice are in big trouble with their population having fallen by 70% since 2000. They are seriously endangered and we want to do what we can to help by managing our wood with dormice in mind. Together with a neighbour, our woods have also been part of the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme for the last two years.

As part of this national programme, there are fifty dormouse nest boxes placed in a grid formation through the woods which are monitored every month from April to November. This week we carried out the first tour of the year around the thirty boxes that are in our wood.

It was a sunny spring morning and the temperature was 14 degrees as we started out. Even though they are no longer hibernating, dormice have the ability to go into torpor. This is a hibernation-like state where their body temperature and metabolism are lowered to conserve energy at times when the weather is bad or cold or if there is not much food about. Although they can go into torpor frequently in the springtime, it is something that I had never seen before.

But on this tour we found four dormice and they were all torpid:

It is always difficult to get a photo of an active dormouse and I often come away from a monitoring tour just with photos of them through the plastic of their weighing bags. But, although it is important to process these torpid dormice swiftly and get them safely back onto the tree before they wake up, we did take the opportunity to snap a few quick photos of them. Oh my goodness they are so sweet:

This next photo shows the distinctive sole of a dormouse foot with its triangular pads:

As well as the three boxes containing dormice, fourteen boxes had complete bird nests in them. These are most probably all blue tit nests since the hole into the box is so small, but it was interesting to see the variation between them. Wrens can also get into the boxes but their nests are not the same – they fill the box with nesting material.

The leisurely tour round the thirty boxes took us two and a half hours, including a stop for a cup of peppermint tea and cake midway. It was really lovely to spend quiet time in the wood and we noticed some other interesting things as we went along:

The trail cameras in the wood have provided these photos this week:

Across in the meadows it is normal for us to be visited by a pair of mallards in the spring who come to the ponds for rest and recreation whilst the energy-demanding egg-laying process is ongoing. But the only mallard sighting this year has been this single male who called by one afternoon this week:

It is a rare sight to see jackdaws in the meadows:

I am looking forward to butterfly season. So far I have just seen the ones that hibernate as adults:

It has been a very blustery week here, which is frustrating for those of us that want to be out invertebrate-spotting. However, whatever the wind is up to, it is now mid April and the days are getting inexorably longer. I always know summer is on its way when I start seeing badgers out and about before it gets completely dark:

I have seen further evidence this week that the female badger is feeding cubs underground and I am impatient to see them – surely it can’t be long now.

Now that it is April, we realised time was fast running out to prepare for the return of our swifts. Apparently swifts have already been spotted coming in off the sea and we want to be completely ready should ours arrive back from their hazardous 14,000 mile round trip down to tropical Africa and back. I do so hope that they will.

We started our swift journey in 2019 when Dave made a semi detached swift box following a design on the Bristol Swifts website. We hung the box high under the eaves looking north and played loud swift calls near the box throughout the summers of 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 and, although lots of swifts were repeatedly brought in by the calls, we didn’t see any of the birds enter the box.

By then, two additional single swift boxes had gone up because there were problems with house sparrows nesting. We wanted to ensure that there was always accommodation available for the swifts should they finally decide to nest here.

Just before the swifts left in 2022, I saw one go into the right hand side of the box and stay in there for about five minutes. After all those years of trying, I actually sunk to my knees at the sight. Then, when the birds returned in early May 2023, they went straight back to that box and we presumed that they bred over the next few weeks. Certainly we saw them quietly going in and out throughout the summer until they left in late July.

We fervently hope that they will be returning this year as well, but wanted to get a camera into the box so that we can understand a bit more of what is going on:

When the roof was prised off the box, it was really interesting to see what was inside:

The camera that is going in will send its images wirelessly to the silver receiver, but it needs a hard-wired power supply. When the builders were sorting the WiFi out in our house and garage recently, we asked them to also take a power line out to the swift box for the camera. They were very tolerant of all the wildlife-related requests we put to them during their time with us, although were perhaps slightly bemused at times.

On checking the Bristol Swifts website again, Dave noticed that they had adapted the swift box plans to make a roosting space for bats at the back of the box. This involved attaching wooden batons to hold the box slightly away from the wall and glueing some thin wooden strips for the bats to grip onto:

The box is now back up in position under the eaves and our fingers are crossed as we anxiously await the return of our nesting pair.

However, this was not the only swift preparation work to be completed before the birds arrive. Our new garage has a wildlife tower which currently cannot accommodate any wildlife – it is waiting for better weather so that the builders can safely go onto the roof and make two holes in its north face:

The Kent bat box is a design originally created by the Kent Bat Group which is particularly suited for common and soprano pipistrelles with two vertical crevices for them to go up into by day. It is self cleaning, with any droppings simply falling out downwards and, by briefly shining a torch upwards into the box, we will be able to see if any bats are roosting in there.

We have just taken delivery of two Schwegler swift boxes to go into the tower once the builders have made the holes. They are designed to be incorporated within buildings with an access tunnel through to the outside:

There is a hatch in the roof of the the garage to get access to the inside of the tower and the swift boxes:

Meanwhile, in the meadows the bee-flies are out:

Hairy-footed flower bees, Anthophora plumipes, though, can retract theirs. This nearly all-black female visits a pot of shrimps-on-the-barbie pulmonaria that I have by the back door.

I have never seen a male hairy-footed flower bee and they are the ones with the hairy feet which got the species its name. I hope to see one soon.

We are not seeing many butterflies on the wing yet. This peacock was warming up on a reptile sampling square:

When I zoom in, I see that its eyes have black spots:

Under another reptile sampling square, quite a collection of slow worms is also warming up:

A female wood pigeon is treated to a fine display by her suitor:

We have a very lovely cherry tree in the garden from which we have never had a single cherry, even though some years it is loaded with fruit – such is its popularity with the wildlife:

At the moment I just have to glance in the direction of the tree for several woodpigeon to explode out of it. They are eating the buds and flowers:

Any cherries that do grow are quickly hoovered up by the starlings, jays and wasps, amongst other things.

The buzzard looking disdainfully at its magpie escort:

One late afternoon I went to find Dave who was editing the meadows – ie pulling prickly things out from where they are not wanted. I spotted him but then realised that I was not the only one watching…

This is a very handsome fellow. However, I am continuing to treat a couple of tatty foxes for mange by sprinkling arsen sulphate onto honey sandwiches each evening. I am eagerly awaited:

There must be a lot of badger setts in the heavily overgrown cliff alongside us. But a few entrances come out directly into the meadows and we have a camera on one of these:

But this is exciting – it may be a blurry photo but you can see that this badger is surely feeding cubs:

The cubs should be coming above ground before too long. I wonder how many there will be?

This morel, Morchella esculenta, was found in the meadows for the first time:

It’s quite a large thing – here is my welly for scale:

We spread a wildflower seed mix in this area back in 2015 which must have included cowslip seed. Every year more cowslips appear and we really look forward to seeing them all:

Over in the wood, a most unexpected new mammal species has been spotted:

The farm alongside the wood is being managed for wildlife and there are currently some cattle grazing on their fields. This pair dodged under the electric wire and made for the woods. I think they were quickly rounded up and returned, although our woodland neighbours’ gate was damaged in the process.

The cut flower bed is a sight to behold. Not just because of the lovely tulips themselves, but because it represents a significant victory in the battle with the rats who, the year before, had dug up and eaten all the tulip bulbs that I had planted:

Tulips do look very beautiful as cut flowers but I think they are best of all when growing in a garden setting. These tulips in our daughters garden in the North Downs are absolutely stunning, especially when set off with the burgundy leaves of the shrub:

I would love to have some of those tulips in my own garden.

On a clear day, France can be seen from the meadows:

On such days, if we turn the birding scope towards France, we can see things in more detail – even the shell craters from World War Two Allied bombing around Mont D’Hubert, just west of Calais, become visible:

We visited this area in 2017 and were stopped in our tracks at the sobering sight of all these craters but I don’t think we properly understood them at the time.

It is the site of the Lindemann Battery, which had the most fearsome guns of all along Hitler’s Atlantic Wall during the Second World War.

Built in 1942, the battery had three enormous guns, each protected by separate reinforced structures with walls up to four metres thick. During the two years they were operational, these three guns sent 2,200 shells across The Channel to explode in South East England.

But, on 4th September 1944, a lucky shell from a British railway gun destroyed one of the three guns. Then, on 21st September 1944, the area was bombed by around 500 Allied bombers which dealt with another of them. The last gun was put out of action when Canadian soldiers stormed the battery on 26th September 1944. Allied forces had landed back onto French soil on D-Day, 6th June 1944, but it had then taken them a long time to fight their way out of Normandy and reach the battery. This June it will be the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

Our house stood on the cliffs overlooking France throughout both World Wars and was within easy reach of the heavy guns of the Lindemann Battery. We think that the house was evacuated and standing empty during the Second World War, but there was a slit trench in the orchard to defend the beach should that ever have become necessary. It is so strange to try to imagine that now, just as the pear trees are coming out into blossom there:

A few years ago we provided a home for about a hundred slow worms, transferred from a nearby site that was being developed. An ecologist with a special interest in amphibians and reptiles oversaw the translocation of the slow worms and has been visiting the meadows ever since to check on their wellbeing. Sadly this will be the last year that he comes – his visits have become part of the rhythm of the year here and we have enjoyed our interesting talks about the reptiles and amphibians of Kent.

I don’t know if our resident corvids thought it would be funny to decapitate a slow worm for his visit and leave it on the ground for him to step over, but this is what they did:

One of these shifty characters could very well be the culprit:

Or it could just as easily have been one of the crows:

Although reptiles are the reason for his visit, he always stops at the ponds to check on our amphibians as well. We have been seeing that the female smooth newts in the ponds are full of eggs:

They will each be laying 300-400 eggs singly onto vegetation and wrapping a leaf around each egg. This week the ecologist showed us some of the eggs that had been laid in the pond. The top of a water forget-me-not leaf has been folded over:

If we temporarily extract the plant from the water, a single white newt egg can be seen in the fold:

Once we got our eye in, we could see lots of these folded-over leaves in the pond and this made us very happy.

Also extremely pleasing is the fact that we now have a buzzard regularly hunting in the meadows which is a good indication that we have a healthy ecosystem going on here:

It is very normal for the buzzard to have a magpie assistant nearby :

One day this week we were out doing some jobs and popped into the bird hide overlooking the scrape at Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory. The scrape has been extended in recent years, and there is now a noisy black-headed gull nesting colony there. I am not terribly familiar with black-headed gulls and was surprised to see that, as well as a white eye ring, the birds in their summer plumage also have an inner red eye ring. It might even be that their eyelids are red:

I had never noticed this before.

This bird has yet to get its summer plumage and doesn’t have that red eye ring:

There was also some interesting behaviour going on – some birds were flattening themselves down onto the water as they interacted with the other birds:

Whilst we were there, we saw this pair of coots mating:

The male’s subsequent dismount forwards involved pitching the female face first into the water although he didn’t seem to notice:

In the wood we have strapped a trail camera to the end of a long hazel pole and are slowly moving it around the various raptor boxes to see what’s going on. In this tawny owl box, the squirrels are definitely setting up home:

However, what is this bird doing top right:

A lookout is posted…..

…and the dove quickly takes a look into the box to see if there is any possibility of nesting in there:

Unfortunately I think the squirrels are probably well and truly ensconced by now and the stock doves will have to try elsewhere.

Last May John and John, the bird ringers, looked in all the raptor boxes to see if any owls were nesting. Sadly they were not but they did find a clutch of baby great tits in one of them. Here, a great tit is again showing interest in a tawny box:

There is a permanent camera set up at another tawny box. I’m sorry to say that squirrels are in this one too:

Although a tawny had a look in this week just to check:

There is also a camera looking at a hole in a cherry tree that green woodpeckers used last year. Squirrels have been carrying leaves past this hole as they build their nest in another hole further up the tree:

Green Woodpeckers haven’t been seen at this hole this year, but great spotted woodpeckers have looked in several times:

And, of course, great tits too:

I am in the middle of a Field Studies Council online course on Discovering Bees. It is not so much about bee identification but more about their biology and ecology. Two weeks in and I am learning a lot – this should form a good basis to help me with bee ID this summer.

As a result, I have my eyes peeled for bees to photograph and identify at the moment, so there might be more bees than usual appearing in this blog for a while..

There is very little surface water in East Kent. Not only is it one of the driest parts of the country, but also any rain that we do get soaks down into the porous chalk rather than running off the land as rivers. Since there are so few water courses, we like to celebrate the ones that we do have and, on Good Friday, we decided to go on a quest to chase the Elham Nailbourne up to its source.

The Nailbourne bubbles up as a spring at St Ethelburga’s Well at Lyminge in the North Downs and then runs north down the Elham Valley for several miles until it joins the Little Stour just before Littlebourne. It’s a very intriguing river because the middle section of the river between Elham and Bishopsbourne is ephemeral and only flows above ground about once every seven years.

We started our Easter quest at the very end of the Nailbourne’s journey where it joins the Little Stour near Littlebourne. The water meadows here were doing a good job of holding some of the surplus water after a winter of rain:

It all gets a bit complicated where the Nailbourne and the Little Stour meet. The Nailbourne arrives from the south and joins the Little Stour very close to its source:

There is no access to the point where the two rivers actually converge, but we walked up river to see both of them as they make their final approach. The Nailbourne was very boisterous after the wet winter we have had:

But the Little Stour, which only arises a short distance from this bridge, was serenely drifting along and was very clear and appealing:

We really liked the Little Stour and walked a bit further to investigate its source:

It seems that I was not alone in feeling the specialness of the spring – close by are the ruins of the medieval Well Chapel:

Once we felt that we understood what was going on at the end of the Nailbourne, we got back in the car and started chasing it back to its source.

We saw a lot of oast houses on our Easter quest, all now no longer drying hops but converted into residential properties. This one was in Littlebourne:

Our first stop as we travelled up the Nailbourne was at Patrixbourne. A road crossed the river at a ford here but it has had to be closed because of the high water level:

Our attention was temporarily diverted by Patrixbourne’s ancient Church:

The carving around the entrance door was amazing:

We tried to go inside the church to see some special stained glass there but a Good Friday service was going on and so we will return another time. Our next stop was at Bridge where the Nailbourne was merrily cantering through the village:

We should have then gone to Bishopsbourne but we were getting tired and decided to miss that stop – we had visited there in January 2021 when the Nailbourne was also running. It seems that these days the Nailbourne might run more often than once every seven years.

Upstream of Bishopsbourne, we were now travelling along the section of the river that is usually a grassy ditch. At Barham:

Once we got to Elham, we were again in a section where the water is always above ground. However there was noticeably less flow here:

We then arrived at our final destination – the source of the Nailbourne at Lyminge. St Ethelburga’s well-house was built over the spring in 1898:

The spring supplied the village with its water until a mains supply arrived in 1905:

The young river trickles its way out of St Ethelburga’s Well at Lyminge and begins its journey down to meet the Little Stour at Littlebourne:

We really enjoyed our mini-expedition on Good Friday and now have a much better understanding of how the Nailbourne works. We would like to return in the summer and see how different things are then.

One day this week the buzzard was hunting in the first meadow, quite close to the house. I took this photo with my camera….

…and then we set up the birding scope with a phone attached to it to get some better photos of the magnificent bird:

It has also been hunting from the haypile:

A tawny owl heads off towards the moon:

The blackthorn is out in wonderful blossom in the hedgerows:

It is really uplifting in the Easter sunshine:

Like small, white explosions:

The cowslips are also out:

A new group of foxes has arrived over the winter and they are really bold:

The pale vixen on the right is very tame indeed and comes right up to me. She looks alright from the front but unfortunately she doesn’t look so good from the rear:

Over in the wood, the young Easter bunny is still living down the burrow:

A tawny owl takes a drink:

Two pond skaters feast on a drowned bumble bee:

And I was surprised to see how many squirrels are currently living in the tawny owl box:

Easter has been early this year but, even so, we have been treated with lovely weather and what a difference that makes. Of course I’ve eaten far too much chocolate and I’m regretting that now. It’s definitely time to get back on track as we continue to appreciate this lovely spring.