There has been a lot of squirrel damage in the wood this year.

The bark is ripped off by the squirrels to get at the sweet sap in the phloem tissue just under the bark, but this means that the tree can no longer move food around. If the tree is ring-barked all the way round its trunk then it will inevitably die:

Even if it not completely ring-barked, the growth of the tree will still be impeded and the scars will allow access for pests and diseases:

The squirrels target beech, oak and hornbeam trees in our wood which are exactly the trees we particularly admire and would want to keep:

It is not fully understood why the squirrels damage trees like this although there are many theories. I am particularly persuaded by a study at Wytham Wood near Oxford where they discovered that it was the females and juveniles that stripped the bark at a time in early summer when they were depleted in calcium – the juveniles were growing fast and needed calcium for bone growth and the females were calcium-depleted after lactating. The sap of beech and oak trees, the trees they particularly target in our wood, is especially high in calcium.

As well as killing our trees, grey squirrels predate birds eggs and young, damage the dormouse and bird boxes and eat hazel and other tree nuts that would otherwise be feeding dormice.

There are several large raptor bird boxes up in the wood, hoping to attract tawny owls, barn owls and kestrels but squirrels nest in them all, rendering them unavailable for birds. We have a camera on one of the tawny owl boxes shown below. Tawnys did actually nest in this box in 2022 but, for the last two springs, both squirrels and owls have tried to nest here and unfortunately the squirrels have won out:

Squirrels have also competed with green woodpeckers for nesting sites in an old cherry tree which is covered in old woodpecker holes. Last year the squirrels drove the birds out:

This year the green woodpeckers returned and successfully reared three young in this hole, but the squirrels were not very far away, nesting in a different hole further up the tree:

Although we feed the birds in the wood, we are confident that the squirrels do not get this food – ‘Squirrelbuster’ feeders very effectively exclude squirrels and we have put trail cameras on the feeders to confirm this. However, the wood itself provides them with plenty of food:

Our wood is supporting a high density of squirrels and we would love their population to be reduced. There is a contraceptive being developed that solely targets grey squirrels, but it is still years away from being available to us. The only option at this time appears to be to shoot them and we understand that this is what many wood owners in our area do. One big question is: do we have what it takes to shoot squirrels and the answer is a resounding No. But another big question is: would we be able to commission a competent professional to humanely shoot our squirrels and, following the death of so many beautiful trees in our wood this summer, we are not sure that we know the answer to this yet.

After several years of training, this summer I was finally granted a dormouse disturbance licence by Natural England. This means that I am now able to monitor the dormice in the wood myself without the kindly eye of my trainer watching over me. I did the August tour of the boxes this week with Dave assisting.

Box 6 had an adult female, an adult male and four young:

We often find yellow-necked mice in the boxes but this month we found wood mice in two of the boxes for the first ever time. They are significantly smaller than the yellow-necks.

There was a large gypsy moth in one of the boxes

The moth that we usually find in the boxes is the copper underwing, a woodland specialist species that causes no harm. We found a few of these this month:

It has been a poor year for butterflies, but there were still plenty to be seen in the marjoram glade in the wood one sunny morning:

The warm weather has brought some lovely woodland birds down to the ponds to drink and bathe:

And I have been enjoying seeing some young birds on the cameras:

We have a cameras on a hole in the ground where a family of rabbits were living earlier this year. This hole must still smell interesting since it receives daily inspections from both foxes and badgers:

Over in the meadows, the ringed female kestrel has been hunting here so often that I have enough photos of her to fill a whole post.

Here she has caught a lizard:

And a great green bush cricket with its long green wings:

But I haven’t yet seen her eating a vole which would be her food of choice.

She does do some high-energy hovering….

…but she much prefers to sit in a tree or on one of our perches as she hunts. She does need to defend these perching posts from the crows and magpies who also like to use them:

The magpies are moulting now and look in a right state:

They are one of the birds enjoying the crop of blackberries now looking so wonderful on the brambles at this time of year:

Blackbirds are the other big blackberry consumers:

Owls have been putting in some ghostly appearances:

And sparrowhawks are ever active in the meadows:

A male sparrowhawk with what could be house sparrow prey…

…which was eaten on the gate:

I am pleased to say that two of this year’s three badger cubs are still going strong. They will have absolutely loved the day of rain we had on Saturday, bringing out the slugs, snails and worms:

Foxes have been keeping a low profile recently but I’m pleased to say that every one of them looks healthy for once. It’s not often that we are completely mange-free here:

This is the first time that we have seen a ploughman’s-spikenard in the meadows. This is a sturdy, short-lived perennial that grows on low-nutrient, calcareous soils. In day’s past this plant used to be rubbed on the skin to act as a cheap and cheerful aftershave for country folk – it does actually smell really quite nice:

Until recently there were three UK native species of cockroach that could survive our winters and lived outside. In the past few years, however, several other species have expanded their range northwards into southern England from Continental Europe. The species below is one of these newly-arrived species and might be Planuncus tingitanus senso lato although these new species are difficult to identify by photo alone. I have seen several of this particular cockroach species around the meadows this summer and have now sent my photos to the cockroach expert at the Natural History Museum. I await his comments:

I finish today with this magnificent wasp spider. The raindrops on her web on Saturday meant that Dave (always sharp-eyed and excellent as an invertebrate-spotter) noticed her amongst the grasses. She is a very large spider with a body length of 2cm, but is also well camouflaged and we had thought that perhaps we might not find one this summer:

She is a grasshopper specialist and I am looking forward to seeing what she gets up to for the next couple of weeks before she leaves her web in early September to build a cocoon structure for her eggs before dying. Once she has gone from her web, we will take that as our cue to start the annual cut of the meadows which we try to delay until as many invertebrates as possible have finished their life cycles.

My mother grew up in Burry Port in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, where her family had lived for generations. We often visited my grandparents there when I was a child and I now have a great affection for the place. Dave, the dog and I went off down memory lane last week when we stayed in Burry Port for a few days.

Even though so much time has passed since those childhood visits, I found the town largely unchanged. There is one enormous difference though – Carmarthen Bay power station, built at the harbour in 1947 and completely overshadowing the little town, was demolished in 1992. This is a huge improvement but, because it was such an iconic Burry Port sight, a part of me strangely misses it:

Looking across to Gower from Burry Port dunes:

My grandmother often told the story of her great-grandfather, John Williams, a vet in Burry Port in the early 19th century, who used to ride his white stallion across the estuary to the Gower at low tide to tend to the animals over there. When the tide is in, as it is in the photo above, this story seems pretty far fetched – but a bit of internet research reveals that there was indeed some sort of causeway between Burry Port and the Gower across the estuary in earlier days.

This photo was taken at Cefn Sidan beach at Pembrey at low tide, when it no longer seems impossible that a white stallion could be ridden over to the Gower:

The upper reaches of Burry Port beach is covered in black slag rocks, telling the tale of heavy industry in the area in days gone by:

There are no such rocks at Cefn Sidan beach at Pembrey, though, where glorious sands stretch as far as the eye can see. Other than a narrow, central, life-guarded section, the beach was mostly deserted even on a sunny weekend in August:

There were razor shells washed up on the beach, some of which were filled with the eggs of the netted dog whelk:

There were also some of these netted dog whelks themselves:

There were signs around the beach about the strandline beetle, Eurynebria complanata:

This large (20mm) black and sandy-coloured beetle hides under driftwood at the strandline by day but comes out at night to feed on sand hoppers and other invertebrates. It used to live on sandy beaches throughout the UK but hasn’t been seen in England since 2002 and is only now known to be on three beaches around Carmarthen Bay, one of them being Cefn Sidan

Another bit of invertebrate interest is the number of snails we saw in the vegetation both at Cefn Sidan and on the dunes at Burry Port:

Back in the 60s I remember visiting Kidwelly Castle with my grandfather, when we had to knock on the door of the caretaker’s house to get the key to let ourselves into the castle.

The castle is under the care of Cadw, the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage, and visiting it these days is a bit more official. The dog was allowed in though, so long as she remained at ground level:

We so enjoyed our time in Burry Port and found it an excellent low-pressure place to visit with the dog, even in the height of summer. It’s a very long way from the east coast of Kent, though – as most places are unfortunately

After our few days in Wales we made our way down to Dartmoor in Devon. The Landmark Trust saves imperilled old buildings from ruin and sympathetically restores them. It then rents these buildings out as holiday accommodation to raise funds for further rescue missions. They are now caring for about two hundred buildings and we were staying in one of these – an old chapel in an ancient hamlet at the very edge of the moor.

It was all very beautiful and historic, although did involve driving down some very narrow lanes with few passing spaces.

We love Dartmoor but hadn’t been there since March 2020, just as covid was taking its stranglehold on the World. There were then off-putting stories of it being completely overrun by holidaymakers during the Covid summers. But we have returned now to find it gloriously easy to get away from everyone once more and feel like you are in a truly wild space.

Back in the Bronze Age (2,300 to 800 BC), the climate on Dartmoor was milder than it is now and many people lived and farmed there. Their monuments can still be seen across the moor today.

One morning we visited Grimspound, a late Bronze Age settlement with 24 hut circles surrounded by a massive stone wall.

I had brought a trail camera with me on holiday and we were very charmed to see that it was a lovely hedgehog that bumbled up each night to eat the peanuts that I put down:

I’m always excited to see a hedgehog because we don’t get them at home unfortunately.

Ten years ago our plan was to move to Dartmoor, but instead we went in the opposite direction to the east coast of Kent where we have family. For many reasons, that was the right decision, but I really regret how far away we now live. However, now that we have returned to Dartmoor after our four year break and rediscovered its wonders, I hope that we will manage to get there every year once more.

Although I’ve had trail cameras pointing at all sorts of different ponds for nearly a decade, I’d never seen a badger take a bath. I’d seen them drink but never had they got themselves wet, even on the hottest of nights. So I was very surprised to see one do so in the wood this week:

The heat this week has also brought some great birds down to the woodland ponds:

Occasionally polecats (or they might be polecat-ferret hybrids) are seen at the wood. Our visitor shown below appeared on several of the cameras this week although never very clearly. But I can see no hint of a facial mask this time and guess this to be a feral ferret rather than a polecat:

The marjoram is now out in flower in a large woodland glade in one section of the wood. It was very sunny when I was there but only a very few butterflies were visiting. This is a marked contrast to previous years – where have all the butterflies gone?

I did, however, see this dingy white plume moth, Merrifieldia baliodactylus, amongst the marjoram, which is fitting since marjoram is its larval food plant:

Over in the meadows, there are two sweet badger cubs:

I am really pleased to see that the cubs are still going around with their mother to be shown the ropes. In the drought summer of 2022, all three of our badger cubs perished and I still feel wobbly about a cub’s ability to get through their first summer. It is a very dry part of the country and difficult for them to dig for worms when the ground is hard.

Foxes would also like to have some of the peanuts but the badgers are the top dogs and the foxes have to wait their turn:

A female tawny owl has been hooting around the house in the evenings. This could be her appearing on the cameras:

And I’m pleased to say that a barn owl has also been seen:

The ringed female kestrel is hunting in the meadows every day at the moment:

She does particularly like the perch in the middle of the second meadow, but this one is also popular with the crows and magpies, so she needs to defend her position:

The corvids do always give way to her:

I have linked photos from two cameras here. The kestrel flies from the perch in the hedgerow….

…down to the small pond nearby for a drink and a bath….

… and returns wet and dishevelled to the perch:

Both a male sparrowhawk and this large, aggressive-looking female are also being seen on the perches and gates around the meadows:

Nice to briefly see a juvenile green woodpecker:

But definitely not nice to see this many magpies:

Over the years we have seen a wide range of things dangling from the beak of a magpie. I think this is a newt here unfortunately:

The magpie on the left has a grasshopper or cricket in its beak:

And this crow has raided a woodpigeon nest:

This blackbird is sticking to blackberries, but she’s taking a lot of them. I have many photos exactly like these:

A variety of birds have been making the most of the weather by sunbathing on a patch of bare earth. This will be significantly warmer than the grassland around it:

And it is also a favourite basking spot for a wall butterfly:

I had been concerned that the drought of 2022 had wiped out the population of narrow-bordered five spot burnet moths that we used to have in the meadows. I hadn’t seen any at all last year but I am delighted to report that some have finally been spotted:

And it has been a good year for southern hawker dragonflies down by the ponds and several have been seen laying eggs:

I came across this photo taken in early August 2016, which was the only year that a local farmer came to cut and bale the meadows for us:

It was a bit of a surprise to see the meadows looking so neat and ordered like this and it was only the beginning of August. I remember that both meadows were cut in their entirety that year, although many of the invertebrates would not have finished their lifecycles by then and it must have been devastating for them. These days we don’t start cutting until September and leave a third uncut on a rotational basis with invertebrates in mind.

I have tried to reproduce this 2016 photo with how the meadows look now, eight years on:

The majestic agapanthus at the entrance to the meadows is having an amazing summer this year:

Last year there were far fewer flowers:

But I can’t talk about the agapanthus without once more mentioning the drought summer of 2022 and showing this shocking photo:

August is far from my favourite month – I worry about the water levels in the ponds, how the badgers are feeding themselves and if it is time yet again to water all the pots. My thoughts are automatically turning to September, when it is time to start cutting the meadows and the bird migration will begin in earnest. The cuckoos and swifts have already mostly gone and I hear that willow warblers have started moving as well. Whilst I don’t want to wish time away, I am definitely looking forward now to September.