Dave was toppled by covid this week and we had to cancel most of the things that we had in the diary and stay at home. However, he is feeling much better now and has emerged from his bed, got onto his tractor and started cutting paths around the rapidly growing grasses out in the meadows.

By the bank holiday weekend Dave was testing negative and we were able to go with our daughter and her boyfriend on an evening wildlife boat trip up the beautiful River Stour. They really wanted to see wild beavers and it is now thought that there are around 140 of them living in the stretch of the river between Canterbury and the sea.

We did see around seven beavers on the trip, a couple of them even standing out on the bank so that we could see their tails. But, since dark was descending fast, I’m afraid that I didn’t manage to get a decent photograph. I did get a few fuzzy photos, however, when we did the same trip back in September 2022:

As well as beavers, we saw kingfishers, kestrels, a cuckoo and bats skimming the waters for flies. It was well past 10pm by the time we returned to our mooring at Grove Ferry, but we all felt like we’d had a great wildlife experience

Back home in the meadows, if we didn’t have a camera in the nest box we would scarcely be aware that the swifts are here, so quietly are they coming and going. We first saw them on the camera on 17th May. On 22nd May I was surprised to see that they had built a circular nest out of feathers stuck together with their saliva – I wasn’t expecting that at all:

Swifts will fly hundreds of kilometres a day whilst feeding – they eat flying insects and also spiders who, although terrestrial, often disperse by launching themselves into the air to be carried on the breeze

They are parasitised by a flat fly, Crataerina pallida, that lives amongst their feathers and sucks their blood. When I first saw this next photo, I thought this insect was one of these horrible things – but then it flew off, so it was actually just an ordinary fly. Flat flies only move through the air hidden amongst the feathers of a bird and can’t fly on their own:

Back in October 2019, John the bird ringer caught a lot of house martins in his net as they migrated across the meadows. House martins have a similar flat fly, Crataerina hirundinis, living in their feathers and, when the bird stops flying because they are caught in the mist net, the flat flies come out to see what is going on:

Until the eggs are laid, the swifts are gone all day long and only return just before it gets dark. Yesterday, however, we did see them repeatedly going in the box during the afternoon. Perhaps they were collecting more airborne feathers?

Then, this morning, a single egg has been laid. Eventually there should be two or three eggs and incubation will only start once the final one has arrived:

The large semi-detached swift box where the swifts are nesting is attached to the side of the house and they are in the right hand side. There is a smaller, single swift box to the right of the big box:

As usual, house sparrows are nesting in this single box. In fact, we only put it up to stop the sparrows nesting in the larger box, keeping it free for the swifts

We have a clump of red hot pokers, Kniphofia, in the garden:

This bank holiday weekend, we were sitting outside with visitors when I saw a house sparrow eating the seeds from one of the red hot poker flowers. Apparently they are fond of these seeds and systematically collect them once the flowers turn yellow. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera to hand but our daughter took a picture on her phone:

In the autumn, the bird ringers have often seen hobbies over the meadows as they migrate south with the swallows. These birds mostly eat dragonflies in the summer but switch to swallows and even swifts, caught on the wing, once dragonfly season is over. We ourselves had never seen a hobby here until one landed on a perch this week:

There is a nice large patch of sainfoin out in the meadows this year which is being well visited by butterflies and bees:

The diminutive grass vetchling is also having a very good year and we are noticing it scattered like delicate, crimson gemstones through the first meadow:

There are several species of the parasitic broomrape found in this country. This one, Orobanche minor, is parasitic on clover:

This bee has collected so much pollen on her hind legs that she has had to stop for a rest on her way back to her nest:

There is constant humming coming from a large and enthusiastically flowering sage bush in the allotment. It is extremely popular with long-tongued bumblebees:

Azure damselflies taking a rest on a water lily from egg laying:

For the second year on the trot we have seen very few green hairstreaks. These butterflies have the widest range of larval food plants of all British butterflies including bird’s foot trefoil, bramble and dogwood, all of which grow abundantly here. So we are happy that it is not something that we are doing that has caused this decline and perhaps they don’t do so well in wet springs:

This silver Y moth has chosen such a good place amongst the plantain to disappear whilst roosting up. If I hadn’t watched it fly in, I’d never have spotted it:

I am very fond of the Mother Shipton. Apparently these moths were named after a 16th century Yorkshire witch, and you can see her profile with a hooked nose and pointy chin on the moth’s wing:

These mint choc chip-coloured beetles are Polydrusus impressifrons:

Four croissant-shaped banks were made last year from chalk and subsoil dug up during our building works. These are now covered in flowers and insect life and we are thoroughly enjoying strolling around admiring them:

One of our little grandsons visited this weekend and, for the first time, walked most of the way round the meadows on his own.

In the wood, I came across a group of four or five fledgling wrens as I was collecting cameras. They created such a racket about being disturbed:

I am not sure that we have any fox cubs in the meadows this year, but we do have some in the wood:

My last photo this week is of our old friend the THV (Trinity House Vessel) Patricia who anchored alongside us one night this week but is looking rather tatty at the moment, we think.

She is the flagship vessel of Trinity House, a charity incorporated by Royal Charter back in 1514 to ensure the safety of shipping and the wellbeing of seafarers. Amongst other things, the Patricia maintains lighthouses, offshore lightships and buoys and she is often to be seen here because of the notorious Goodwin Sands. In fact I see that she currently has three buoys her deck as part of this work. She used to take twelve fare-paying passengers as she went around the UK carrying out her vital work, and we always thought that we would like to do that one day. But she stopped taking passengers in 2020 and so we now have to content ourselves with her occasional but comforting offshore presence alongside the meadows and we are always inexplicably excited when we see her come in and drop anchor.

I am delighted to report that our two swifts have returned to their box this week, after a fourteen thousand mile round trip to Southern Africa and back:

Initially they were only returning to the box at the end of the day, and they had left again by the time we got up in the mornings. Now they are here for much longer.

This is the first time we have got the opportunity to properly observe nesting swifts and I have researched what might be expected over the next few weeks. Two or three white eggs should be laid soon and incubation will only begin after the final egg is laid. Nineteen to twenty-one days after that, in mid June, the eggs then hatch. The chicks fledge five to eight weeks later, which would be late July or early August. Then they will all head off to Africa.

But, for now, there are no eggs in the box:

It is such a privilege to observe these special and unusual birds and we are really looking forward to seeing how they get on.

It’s been quite a busy week and I haven’t had time to do much invertebrating. I have, however, carried out a dormouse monitoring tour in two different woods this week. The first one on Wednesday was in a Kent Wildlife Trust wood in a beautifully rural part of East Kent that seems to have been completely overlooked by the 21st century. Access to and around this wood is difficult and it is being managed by the Trust for the monitoring of dormice and reptiles rather than for public access.

Looking at the little hamlet across the valley, with its oast house and cottages and with wood smoke gently rising, felt like we had stepped back a hundred years:

An olde worlde windmill is very close to the wood as well:

We saw a common milkwort in the grass before entering the wood – this was a new plant for me:

Once in the wood, there were a lot of early purple orchids and common twayblades flowering.

This stinkhorn fungus lived up to its name and absolutely stank. It was also covered in flies:

We worked our way around the fifty dormouse boxes in the wood. Two of the boxes had a bee nest in them and two had a wren nest with mossy nest material completely filling the box. Many more had blue tit nests within, some still with eggs, but others now with chicks:

One box had a lovely leaf nest, but this was no dormouse:

We struck gold in box 14:

This is where we found a gorgeous torpid dormouse:

Dormice hibernate through the winter but, even after they have woken in the spring, they still have the ability to go into torpor which is a temporary hibernation-like state. This saves energy on chilly spring mornings or when food is in short supply, but it is very peculiar picking up a torpid dormouse because it is completely cold as if it is dead.

The second dormouse monitoring tour of the week was on Saturday when my trainer and I went round the fifty boxes at our own and our neighbour’s wood. The day was overcast and we hoped that the threatened rain would hold off whilst we got through the boxes.

In the event we had a most productive (and thankfully dry) morning, finding twelve torpid dormice:

Our morning’s haul of dormice included four pairs that were curled up together:

All the dormice were all in some sort of comfortable nest other than a lone female in box 45 who was torpid in an empty box:

Blue tits and wrens are small enough to get into these boxes. Although there were no wren nests in this wood, twenty-four of the fifty boxes had blue tit nests in them, mostly now with chicks. However, box 12 was very exciting – it had marsh tit chicks in it instead:

I worry that we have an unnaturally high population of blue tits in our wood because we have feeders and the dormouse boxes provide plenty of safe nest sites for them. These blue tits would then be taking all the insects to feed their chicks at the expense of other species of birds, such as tree creepers perhaps. A possibility would be to remove the feeders of course, but they do provide a real focus for the bird ringers. I’m not sure what the way forward is at the moment and am still considering the options..

Other photos from the wood this week:

Tawny owl at one of the ponds:

Green woodpeckers busy at their nest:

A long-legged sparrowhawk:

A badger skirmish near their sett:

And sweet little fox cubs are starting to be seen out and about now:

Across in the meadows, this photo was most unexpected and hilarious:

Somewhere, herring gulls are building their nest:

An orange tip butterfly settling down for a rest:

Common blue butterflies are now out and about in the meadows:

All of a sudden I am seeing these beetles everywhere:

A fox emerges up into the meadows from the cliff:

And the entire badger family eating the nightly peanut feast we lay on for them:

Lots of wonderful things happen in May; the swifts have returned, birds are nesting all around, the dormice are back in their boxes, and to top it off the peonies are coming into flower in the garden.

These peony flowers don’t last for long but, for a brief moment of time in mid May, they stop you in your tracks.

Six miles offshore from Deal lie the notorious Goodwin Sands, a ten mile long chain of sandbanks which is only exposed at low tide and which completely disappears beneath the waters at high tide.

But over the centuries the Goodwin Sands have earned themselves the name of the ‘Great Ship Swallower’ having caused over two thousand shipwrecks. Often the ship would run aground but any sailor that climbed out onto the sandbank would then be drowned as the tide came in.

These days Dover Sea Safari runs occasional trips in their rib out to the Goodwins but they can only go at really low tides when the weather is calm. We went on one of these trips this week.

The rib is kept in Dover harbour’s swanky new marina:

After leaving Dover harbour, we travelled north hugging the coast as far as St Margarets before turning out to sea. There are always ominous signs of recent rock falls in front of the beautiful white cliffs:

This slot was carved into the chalk by chains that were used to salvage the cargo from the Preussen which was shipwrecked in 1910 in Crab Bay:

The Preussen was the World’s only five-masted ship with each mast carrying six square sails, and she could travel very fast indeed when in full sail. But her speed proved to be her undoing:

Any image of a hundred grand pianos being hauled up the cliffs on chains has unfortunately not been preserved for prosperity, but it must have been a very bizarre sight indeed.

At St Margarets Bay, the sun was shining on the group of white houses down on the shore. Noel Coward and subsequently Ian Fleming lived here after the Second World War.

Once we arrived at the Goodwin Sands, we were decanted four at a time into a smaller boat and pulled ashore by one of the crew:

We then had forty-five minutes to wander the sands before we needed to return to the boat:

There was a surreal, otherworldly feel to the place. The tides have carved the sand into intricate designs:

Our time there was very limited but it felt like we should sit and try to absorb the strange atmosphere of the place.

We were very aware that we were walking on hallowed ground and it was impossible to forget how many lives have been lost there.

For forty-five minutes we were temporarily intruding somewhere that humans shouldn’t be…

A strange new world where we didn’t belong.

The East Goodwin Lightvessel could be seen to the north of us, warning shipping of the danger:

There were no shells and no worm casts on the sands, just a couple of washed up cuttlefish and this single dead sand eel:

Grey seals haul out here at low tide. We had disturbed one little group into the water as we arrived even though we hadn’t got close. The sight of any human at all there is so unusual:

But they were back in place again by the time we left:

On the horizon to the north there was a very long line of grey seals:

Towards the end of our time on the sandbank, the weather changed rapidly – the wind picked up and a fog bank rolled in. There was an urgency in the air to get the ten off us off the Goodwins and back onto the boat:

Once we were all safely aboard, the rib turned for home and soon out ran the fog, arriving back in Dover in the evening sunshine. It is not often that weather and tide conditions come into line and allow these trips to run and we were fortunate to have got the opportunity to spend some time in such a special place.

The weather has been mostly sunny and calm recently and I have been in my happy place – pottering around the meadows photographing invertebrates and then trying to identify and learn about them. I have been doing this so much this week that I only include a small selection here.

In last week’s post I included this photo. This is a mating pair of Empis tessellata dance flies, also called dagger flies. The male gives the female a nuptial gift of a dead fly (a St Marks fly in this case) and mates with her as she eats it:

This week I saw the same thing happening but on a much smaller scale. These flies are also Empis sp but are very tiny at only about 3mm long:

A scorpion fly is another species where the male will give the female a nuptial gift to keep him safe from her as he then mates with her:

Small blue butterflies have emerged out into the meadows:

Last autumn I planted several plugs of horseshoe vetch onto the new chalk banks and they are flourishing there with little competition from other plants for now:

We saw a small blue butterfly nectaring up on the horseshoe vetch:

It is the time of year when the meadows are filled with the yellow of buttercups:

Buttercups provide a lot of pollen and this seems to be particularly appreciated by small beetles:

A hawthorn shield bug, quite a sizeable and magnificent animal at 14mm long excluding its antennae:

And a hatching out of tiny little spiderlings:

Although I am very much still discovering new species of invertebrates in the meadows, it is rare to see a new mammal species after being here for ten years. But this week a stoat was on the cameras for the first time ever:

There has been an increase in the rabbit population these last couple of years and this is probably what has interested the stoat:

Also partial to rabbit, of course, are the foxes:

The sense of smell of a badger is so developed that it can detect where there are baby rabbits underground and can then dig down through the soil to get at them. Here is our female badger with this year’s triplets:

In the wood, the green woodpeckers are still very active in and around the hole in the old cherry tree:

The camera trained onto the tree is picking up incidental wildlife that passes along the track behind:

Jays are frequent and enthusiastic bathers in the ponds:

This flamboyant hoverfly, Helophilus pendulus, likes to hang out around ponds as he awaits a female:

The regenerating section of the wood is now filled with bugle:

My last photo for today is from this afternoon’s stroll round the meadows – two newly emerged broad-bodied chasers were circling the hide pond….dragonfly season has begun!

Last weekend we made the most of some lovely bank holiday weather to get ourselves out and about. On Sunday morning we set out early to visit the Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory scrape to see how the black-headed gull colony was getting on. We are not very familiar with black-headed gulls yet, but I already love how they use body postures and wing positioning to communicate with each other.

The shingle ridges would probably be where the gulls would choose to lay their eggs but these are still underwater after the wet spring, so they were making the best of things and nesting in the grass of the islands:

The birds are at the egg laying stage and there was much ongoing mating:

The colony was busy and loud, but not so cacophonous that we couldn’t hear the wonderful call of a cuckoo floating across the water. Other species were quietly going about their business nearby:

We will return to the scrape before too long and hope to see some spotty gull chicks.

On bank holiday Saturday we went to a plant fair at Saltwood Castle, near Hythe. The late MP Alan Clark was a controversial figure but he inherited this medieval castle from his father and his widow still lives there today, opening the castle grounds for a few days each year to support local charities:

I have to also include a photo of this cake stall because the cake we had from here was really nice:

Always on the look out for wildlife, we heard a rustling in the undergrowth and I suppose shouldn’t have been surprised when a peacock emerged. We were, after all, at a castle:

Eight tortoises were contained in a cage for the day. Ordinarily they live amongst the castle grounds:

Alan Clark’s collection of heritage cars was on display in the garages:

On leaving Saltwood Castle and heading for home, we took the wrong road and pulled into a driveway to turn around. We then noticed that it was the entrance of a house that was just about to open under the National Garden Scheme and so we spontaneously drove in. We had unexpectedly arrived at Sandling Park, and that morning was the first time that the gardens were opening to the public since the outbreak of covid. We were the first to arrive.

We talked to one of the family who live here and between them they manage the expansive gardens with the help of just one gardener. We learned that ravens nest in a large conifer up by the house every year and that she has already seen two hoopoes on her lawn this spring. The garden is also very rich in hedgehogs which is wonderful to hear – we don’t get them at all in the meadows or in the wood.

We might not have been meaning to visit Sandling Park but it was an uplifting spring garden and well worth the visit. Another helping of tea and cake was involved, of course.

This week I spent some quality time with a centipede. Unlike all the centipedes that I have ever seen before, this one moved in a very leisurely fashion so I had plenty of time to get some photographs and to have a proper look at how it moved all those 71 pairs of legs without tripping over. It was mesmerising.

In September I will have been writing this blog for ten years and I believe that this is the first time that it has ever included mention of a centipede.

The hawthorn is in full flower in the meadows and providing pollen and nectar for all sorts of interesting invertebrates:

There is one particular reptile sampling square under which large numbers of slow worms gather to warm up:

Viviparous lizards are the other reptiles that live in the meadows:

Every summer a few pairs of starlings arrive to breed. There are seven birds here and so there might be four pairs this year:

A tawny owl is on this new perch every night:

This is very pleasing because the perch is in a part of the meadows that we have been tentatively developing into a different type of habitat over the last two or three years. Selected bushes of bramble and blackthorn have been left to grow up in this area but we are keeping the grasses mowed around them to maintain control. We thought that whitethroats and other small birds might like to nest in the thorny clumps, but the repeated visits by this tawny recently suggest that they are also providing shelter for small mammals and the area is now developing its own personality, distinct from the rest of the meadows:

A kestrel has been hunting here as well:

I am pleased to report that there are three baby badgers this year – triplets! They have started to come out with their mother to be shown the ropes:

A fox on the hay pile:

For two nights this week we had Vigilant, a Border Force vessel, anchored alongside the meadows. The Goodwin Sands offshore from the meadows, are exposed only at low tide and can be seen behind Vigilant here. The black blobs on the sand are grey seals:

We sometimes get a bizarre optical illusion where ships seem to be flying through the skies. This was particularly extreme one day this week, although we only had our phones with us so the photo isn’t great:

We hear that swifts are now arriving in the country, although we haven’t seen any as yet. Now, with maybe not a moment to spare, we are finally prepared for them. The builders have today returned to fit the swift boxes into the tower of our new garage:

Inside the tower the boxes are now up:

The backs of the boxes can come off and there is then a perspex screen. This could also come away for the bird ringers to ring any chicks, should there ever be any:

A birds eye view out from the box and across the meadows:

Last year swifts nested in a box that is attached to the house, and we now have a camera in there ready to leap into action:

So, everything is ready. All we need now are some swifts….

Dave’s father was an RAF aircraft engineer working on Spitfires, Hunters and the amazing Sunderland flying boats amongst others over the course of his long military career.

Dave spent his boyhood living on or close to RAF air bases around Great Britain as well as spending three tropical years in Singapore. All this has nurtured a lifelong interest in aircraft and so, for his birthday last weekend, we visited the Shuttleworth Collection near Biggleswade in Bedfordshire. The collection is home to over fifty vintage planes, most of which can and do still fly today. Sadly there is no Sunderland in the collection and not one of those iconic white planes remains airworthy today. However, a Blériot XI, the World’s oldest still-flying plane, is in the Shuttleworth Collection:

On 25th July 1909, Blériot made history by flying across the English Channel and crash landing onto the Dover cliffs, not far from the meadows where our house was due to be built just a few months later. The plane that made this World famous crossing was a Blériot XI, but that plane never flew again. Another Blériot XI of around the same age, however, is housed at the Shuttleworth Collection and still regularly flies.

We wandered slowly round the hangers, admiring the planes and reading the information boards.

Another aeroplane that caught my eye is this Lysander below, painted all black in the colours of a WWII clandestine Special Duties aircraft. These planes were able to land and take off from very short, improvised airstrips and were used to place agents into and recover them from occupied France during the war. These night flights always took place within a week either side of the full moon since the plane only carried a map and a compass and moonlight was essential for navigation.

This First World War information poster shows the surprising variety of airships that were in service at the beginning of that war:

The Shuttleworth Estate has a ten acre Swiss Garden with a romantic Swiss cottage:

The ceiling under the thatch is beautifully decorated with pine cones:

The garden also has a very atmospheric grotto:

The wisteria arches in the grotto were just coming out into flower:

We stayed in a hotel near Leamington Spa that I had stayed in ten years previously when one of our sons was graduating from Warwick University. I remembered that it had a fabulous garden back then and was pleased to find that, even though the building complex was much expanded, its gardens still remain very lovely today:

The birthday weekend continued the next day with a visit to the National Garden Railway exhibition near Kenilworth, Warwickshire – this is another of Dave’s hobbies:

I stayed at the exhibition with Dave for a couple of hours before taking myself off to a nearby Warwickshire Wildlife Trust reserve, Brandon Marsh.

It was cold and gently raining and consequently I saw little of note there, but I did have a nice walk surrounded by nature and visited all of the eight hides that are currently open on this big reserve:

I was pleased to see three common terns newly arrived back to the country and sitting on their tern raft. There were also many Canadian geese on the reserve – I think this one must have been on eggs but she didn’t move while I watched her and so I couldn’t say for sure:

The interesting geological wall at the reserve demonstrated the varying geology across Warwickshire. Geology is another of Dave’s interests, but he was still engaged elsewhere with his model trains.

Having spent the weekend pursuing a few of Dave’s many hobbies, we returned to Kent to see how the wildlife was getting on here. The headlines are that two baby badgers have been seen poking their heads out of their burrow:

We have only had this one glimpse of them so far. I suspect that they are coming above ground every night now, but not where we have a camera set up.

Last week I said how pleased I was that the egg-laying mallards are able to seek rest and sanctuary in the meadows, so it was a shame to see that the dog had alarmed them this week:

I wasn’t delighted to see this next photo either. With that tail, there is no denying that this is a very large rat swimming in the pond:

A male sparrowhawk continues to be seen a lot around the meadows:

And it was good to see the buzzard back again this week, being bothered as ever by magpies:

Slow worms warming up under a sampling square:

I look after one of our grandsons one day each week and, even though he is only eighteen months old, his zest to learn all about the world around him is enormous. This week he and I spent a couple of hours pottering around his sunny garden looking for invertebrates that I could tell him about. Here are a few of the more interesting things that we saw:

Other invertebrates that have been seen in the sunny meadows this week:

Expanding this photo, the black-tipped rostrum can seen – their mouthparts have been modified into this long beak used for sucking fluids from plants:

Behind their second pair of legs, you can see the teardrop-shaped stink gland. When threatened by predators, the bug releases a foul-smelling cocktail of chemicals onto the shiny area surrounding the gland which acts as a deterrent:

St Marks flies have been flying around the hedgerows with their hind legs characteristically dangling this week. There are mating pairs everywhere:

I have also seen a common dance fly, Empis tessellata, a predator of the St Marks flies:

A male of these dance flies will catch a St Marks fly and then offer it up as a present to a female so that he can mate with her while she eats it:

The tulips at Walmer Castle are starting to go over now. Here they are last week with the backdrop of the beautifully trained fruit trees and the magnificent cloud hedge:

But here they are this week, many flowers having now finished and been deheaded. I’m sorry to see them go:

All these bulbs are soon to be dug up so that the vegetables, currently hardening off in the cold frames, can go in. Fresh tulip bulbs will then be planted in the autumn as the cycle begins once more

It has been a wet and cold old April – apparently the UK as a whole experienced 55% more rainfall than an average April. For us, here on the East Kent coast, it has also been windy and cold for much of the month. On our trip to the Midlands last weekend, we found that spring was noticeably further along there than it is at home, which wasn’t what we had expected. But it feels like all that is behind us now as we forge full steam ahead into summer. May is here, the buttercups are coming out in the meadows, the invertebrates are appearing and summer-visiting birds are beginning to arrive and breed. I have begun to apprehensively scan the skies for swifts – they should be arriving any day now and it is an anxious wait.