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.