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..