We spent last weekend in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds:

We had booked ourselves onto a Naturetrek day trip exploring the nature of the Painswick valley on the Saturday, and the plan was to make a weekend of it by doing other things in the area on Friday afternoon, and again on Sunday morning, before heading home.

In the event, the motorway system across the South of England on Friday was in complete crisis and, instead of taking us three and a half hours, the journey took us seven. We had set off from home at 10am and arrived, exhausted and in a ‘never again’ frame of mind, at 5pm. But our hotel was absolutely charming and soon worked its magic, helped by a glass of chilled, crisp white wine whilst relaxing in the gardens.

The next morning we met up with the other five people in our Naturetrek group along with a very knowledgeable guide. Over the course of the day we visited three nature reserves around Painswick looking at the invertebrates, plants and birds that were to be found there:

The photo below was taken in the meadows a few years ago. A wasp nest had been ripped open by a badger and, as I was trying to photograph the devastation, a Volucella zonaria flew in to check it out and see if she had an opportunity to lay her eggs.

This next invertebrate was the most exciting spot of the day for me. It is a Downland Villa bee-fly, Villa cingulata, and what a lovable dumpy shape it is. This fly was thought extinct in the UK, having not been spotted anywhere in the second half of the 20th century. However, it was rediscovered in The Cotswolds in 2000 and has been regularly seen ever since, mainly in The Cotswolds and The Chilterns. Unlike other bee-flies, the Villa bee-flies do not have a permanently extended proboscis and, although not much is currently known of its lifecycle, its hosts are thought to be noctuid moths rather than solitary bees

We had a really enjoyable day with a lovely group of people and we felt that it had been worth battling the horrors of the motorway system on a summer Friday.

After the field trip, we called in for a drink at a pub in the village of Minchinhampton before returning to the hotel.

On Sunday morning we visited the gardens of the Miserden Estate near Stroud, which has been in the Wills family since 1913.

A sculpture exhibition is being held in the gardens this summer:

The gardens were beautiful and we enjoyed looking for successful planting combinations as ideas for our own garden back in Kent:

I am generally not a fan of sycamore trees but this one is thought to be 250 years old and is pretty magnificent. It is growing out of a stone wall:

The motorways redeemed themselves slightly on the journey home on Sunday afternoon by not throwing any more horrible jams or diversions at us, but we have definitely resolved not to travel on a Friday again if we can help it.

Before we left for Gloucestershire, the two swift chicks in the box on the house had seemed ready to fledge:

But on our return, both swift chicks still remained in the box:

Our swift year has now come to a very satisfying end. It has been completely fascinating and we have learnt so much about them. Soon all four birds will be en route for Africa and we can only mentally wave them off and wish them every luck for their journey. I do so hope that we will see them all again next year.

My final photo for today is of the flat roof below the box, where there is a surprising amount of muck:

I presume that these are the faecal sacks produced by the chicks that the adults have carried out of the box and immediately dropped. But now that the birds have gone, this is the only outward sign that they were ever here at all and I am finding it a strangely pleasing sight.

We had visitors last weekend and we all took a trip on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway which runs for 13.5 miles from Hythe in Kent down to Dungeness which is one of the largest expanses of shingle in Europe.

During the Second World War, the railway was requisitioned by the War Department who built the only miniature armoured train in the world to run on it. This train was used to carry supplies to construct PLUTO – pipeline under the ocean – which ran from Dungeness to Boulogne and helped fuel the Allied invasion force in France:

We all got off the train at Dungeness, the end of the line, but I felt a bit frustrated about only being there on foot along with everyone else on the train, with little to do other than to have lunch and then wait for a train back again. The station is close to Dungeness nuclear power station…

..and the iconic old lighthouse, operational between 1904 and 1960:

On our return journey, I was able to photograph Hythe sound mirror from the train shortly before arriving in Hythe:

Back home, we have been following the progress of two swift chicks being reared in a box attached to our house. As the chicks have grown, things have started to get quite crowded, especially with both adults in there as well overnight:

By 23rd July one of the chicks was flapping its wings all around the box in preparation for fledging:

I think this chick will fledge vey soon now. Their rate of growth has been so fast – here is a comparison between July 3rd and July 23rd:

Both chicks peeping out at the big, wide world that they will soon be a part of:

For this last stage of their development, perhaps the chicks are being well fed with the bulky flying ants which are now dispersing up into the air from the hundreds of ant nests spread across the meadows:

It has turned out to be a jolly good July for six-spot burnet moths:

As the photo above shows, we used to see narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moths as well, although sadly I haven’t spotted one here since 2022. I am now chasing and trying to photograph every burnet moth I come across in the hope that it turns out to be a narrow-bordered five-spot – I would love for them to still be here.

My potting shed is less than a year old but is already laced with sticky spider webs. This large and magnificent oak eggar moth was hopelessly entangled one morning but was still alive so I managed to successfully rescue it. I have now cleared all webs away with a broom and will continue to do this as the summer progresses.

Marbled white butterflies are still flying in the meadows:

I like the shading on the wings of this hoverfly:

This is an emperor dragonfly exuvia – the empty shell of a dragonfly larva now that the adult has emerged from it and taken to the air:

And here is an adult emperor dragonfly, sticking her eggs onto vegetation in the pond, beginning the emperor lifecycle once more:

The breeding season is drawing to a close for many of the birds in the meadow. Young crows are still begging for food from their parents though:

The adult magpies have finished raising their chicks and now beginning their annual moult:

This robin is spreading its wings out in the sunshine which is thought to both help spread preen oil over its feathers and drive parasites out:

I can’t see a ring on this female kestrel so this might be a second bird hunting in the meadows:

We hadn’t seen a plant like this before and couldn’t find it in any of our reference books:

There were tiny single flowers sticking up from the whorl:

We are very fortunate in having the plant recorder for East Kent living round the corner and she came to have a look at this strange plant of ours. It turns out that it is in fact a ribwort plantain, Plantago lanceolata, but one that has had a genetic mutation, causing it to grow in a completely different way. The word for strange plant growths like this is fasciation.

This is a much more familiar way for a ribwort plantain to grow:

In the wood, a lot of the sycamore trees have pale mottling all over their leaves this year:

This mottling is caused by the tiny sycamore-specialist leafhopper, Eurhadina Ioewii, and several adults were still to be seen on the undersides of the affected leaves:

And some of the larvae as well:

These leafhoppers are obviously having a bumper year because we have not seen the sycamores looking like this before.

This hogweed has been very prettily decorated by the leaf-mining larvae of the fly Phytomyza spondylii or Phytomyza pastinacae. The larvae live within the leaf tissue and move around as they eat the leaf cells, creating these white lines:

The hotter weather has been bringing some interesting birds down to the ponds in the wood:

My final photo for today is of the evening concert and picnic that we also went to with our visitors last weekend:

This event is part of Canterbury Festival and is held every year in the gardens of Barham Court. As we ate our picnic and danced to the music, we could admire the parties of swifts as they circled the green copper church spire to the left of the house. Now approaching the end of July, every sighting of a swift is precious because it might turn out to be the last one we have until next May.

My sister’s eldest daughter got married last weekend and Dave and I stayed in a Airbnb near the wedding venue with her family and the bridal party

The Airbnb was on the edge of the rural Hampshire town of Whitchurch and was the former home of Lord Denning (1899-1999), who was the best known British judge of the 20th century:

His family continue to own the house and many mementoes of his life remain there. His study is lined with his law books, often adorned with his hand written notes in the margins:

There are photographs of the great man on the study mantlepiece:

And other photos on the walls – Lord Denning with Churchill here:

And, later, with Queen Elizabeth II:

Several chairs made for Royal occasions, such as the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 and the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, still remain in the house:

But the most wonderful thing of all about the house was that its lawns swept down to the crystal clear waters of the River Test, with a bridge across to a private island.

We were there for the wedding not for the wildlife, but it was such a wonderful place that of course we couldn’t resist:

The gravel bed of the river is used by brown trout to lay their eggs. We were delighted by how many of these beautiful fish we saw, quietly facing upstream waiting for invertebrates to be brought down to them by the current:

Peering over the bridge by the silk mill in Whitchurch, there must have been thirty large trout below us in the water. It was quite a sight:

I am particularly pleased with this photo:

A view of another section of the Test. Here work has been done to restore the river banks allowing the return of water vole and water rail:

An information board about the life cycle of the brown trout:

We have vowed to return to the River Test soon to spend some more time getting to know its wonders.

On the way home we called into Maidenhead in Berkshire to see two of our children. I also went round to the house of some friends who have some scarce and exciting bees visiting their garden at the moment. They are large scabious mining bees, Andrena hattorfiana, which are Britain’s largest mining bee.

There are records of this bee for East Kent and we do certainly have field scabious in the meadows:

However, I am yet to see this bee here. Apparently they only fly a maximum of 900m from their nest site so, if there isn’t a population in our immediate vicinity, then I suppose we won’t see one however much field scabious we grow. All the same, I think I will sow some additional field scabious seed this autumn just in case.

There may be no large scabious mining bees on our scabious but these sinister-looking flies also love this plant and I’m seeing a lot of them this year:

The meadows used to be alive with burnet moths in the high summer but for the last couple of years there have been very few. Possibly numbers have been terribly affected by the recent drought summers.

Now is the time of the year that we start pulling ragwort. However, if there are cinnabar moth caterpillars on the plant we leave it alone and return at a later date once the caterpillar has pupated:

It is unusual for kestrels to hunt here in high summer when their rodent prey is safely hidden amongst the tall grasses. But once the meadows start to be cut in September, they return to see what opportunities this might throw up for them. Back in September 2019 a young female kestrel was ringed here and she has continued to use these meadows to hunt ever since. This year she has turned up earlier than usual and is being seen on various cameras around the meadows:

The average lifespan of a wild kestrel in the UK is four years but this female is already over five years old. The longest lived wild Kestrel in the UK is recorded as fifteen years and eleven months.

Kestrels can use the UV spectrum of light to see the urine trails of small mammals and thus know where the most productive places to hunt are likely to be. We are keeping two large areas of the meadows cut short this year to check on our wild parsnip issue – I wonder if this is why this kestrel is back earlier than expected.

Since we returned from the wedding, parties of swifts have been screaming around the meadows on a regular basis – we have never seen so many swifts here other than when they are migrating south en masse. A group of about a dozen have been circling the wildlife tower from which we are broadcasting swifts calls to help them find the two new nest boxes:

But they are also very interested in the swift boxes attached to the house. We are not playing calls from here but there is a family of swifts nesting in one of the boxes and so perhaps they can hear the chicks:

The baby swifts in the box are growing fast. Although we were away when the eggs hatched, we think it would have occurred between 17th to 19th June. The chicks fledge five to eight weeks later and so the earliest that this will happen is 22nd July – next Monday – but this is dependant on many factors, including the weather.

On 11th July, there were screaming parties of swifts going round the house and one of the parent birds was in the box looking out at them:

From the outside this looked like this:

Once back from the wedding, the chicks had noticeably grown and developed more of that distinctive swift shape:

Now it is the chicks that are peering out of the hole but they are making me anxious – I do hope that they will be careful not to fall out:

My last photo for today is of a beautiful sunset over the meadows this week.

A sunset is such a fleeting thing and I find it impossible not to attempt to capture its beauty with a photo before it slips away.

This week we needed to visit the Wildwood Trust, near Canterbury, to deliver a very large chinchilla cage that we were donating to them. Pebbles, our old chinchilla, sadly died earlier this year and Wildwood were delighted to accept the cage to keep their rats in.

Wildwood Trust is a native species conservation charity which aims to protect, conserve and rewild British wildlife. Locally in recent years, it has worked with others to reintroduce bison into Blean woods near Canterbury and release red-billed choughs onto the cliffs near Dover, as well as so much more across the country as shown on this information board:

As well as all this fantastic work going on behind the scenes, Wildwood also runs a zoo to showcase British wildlife. Since we were at Wildwood anyway, we took the opportunity to wander round the zoo to see some of our British animals up close. The enclosures at Wildwood are mostly very well vegetated and sometimes the occupant cannot be seen – we like that animal welfare comes first, of course, but it can be disappointing. However, here are some of the animals we did see this time:

We enjoyed ourselves at Wildwood but will need to return again to have another attempt to see some of the animals.

Swifts are another species that need protecting and conserving. Swift Awareness Week at the beginning of July each year sees events being held across the country to celebrate these enigmatic and special birds. I went along to an open day being held at a house in our local town of Deal that, in just a few short years, has become a home to a thriving local colony. As I approached the house, screaming parties of many swifts circled low over my head – guaranteed to bring a smile to my face. I find it very uplifting to see what can be achieved if you care enough.

There are twenty-seven swift boxes up around the three sides of the house and I believe fourteen or more of them are occupied this year. Many of the boxes have good quality cameras in them so that the nests are monitored in detail and much has been learnt about the problems faced by these birds as they bring up their families.

We now have six swift boxes up on our own house and garage, although, for now, there are swifts nesting in just one of them. But for the first time we are able to observe what is going on in that box. As the two chicks are now starting to grow their feathers, they are increasingly being left unattended while both parents go out to collect food for them:

As I watched, a parent entered the box with its white throat noticeably bulging with insects caught on the wing. Bedlam breaks out in the box as the chicks go wild:

The parent puts its beak down a chicks throat and releases the food:

The young swifts really look most extraordinary at the moment. Their little tail feathers are still in their protective sheaths:

I am so enjoying being able to observe the progress of this nest and am learning a lot.

It is estimated that 70% of a badgers diet is made up of earthworms. But in the summer, when the ground is dry and hard, the worms go down deep and are difficult for a badger to get at. So, in order to survive, a badger has to diversify at this time of year and one of the things they can do is to rob wasp and bee nests of their larvae and food stores. They particularly like the nest of the buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, because they have large broods of tasty larvae. I read that a badger’s sense of smell is so acute that it can detect exactly the right night to raid the nest to score the greatest amount of food.

This week a buff-tailed bumblebee nest was dug out by a badger:

The diggings were covered with dead and dying bees. They will have stung the badger but this isn’t enough to deter it:

A nearby camera showed that the nest was dug out by the female badger, with her two cubs in close attendance. She was no doubt teaching them what they have to do to survive a summer when you are a badger. The next night I put a camera to point at the diggings and a cub returned to the scene of the crime:

I am pleased that the cubs are also being brought to the nightly peanuts that we put out for them:

When the sun comes out, it is the marbled white and meadow brown butterflies that are dancing over the meadows now that it is early July:

The trail cameras around the meadows often give insights into what the birds are eating. This crow has raided a nest – perhaps this is a woodpigeon egg?

The magpie has a large cockchafer:

I am getting a lot of photos of song thrush carrying snails in their beaks:

Over in the wood, the newly fledged green woodpeckers are yet to appear on any of the cameras. But I am seeing great spotted woodpecker chicks that have fledged as well:

Every year bullfinch breed in the wood, although I am yet to see their young this year:

This was a treat – a little weasel pops its head up at a pond:

We woke up this morning to find that the country has a new Labour Government and, here in Dover and Deal, we now have a Labour MP. Let us hope that, once the realities of being at the helm begin to bite, the new government sticks to its promises to protect and conserve our wildlife as well as to take the huge problem of the climate emergency very seriously indeed.