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.