It has been quite wet but Dave has been alive to any opportunity to get out on the tractor and continue with the cut of the meadows:

The annual cut is a vital part of maintaining the land as grassland, but there is no doubt that it can be a catastrophic event for the small mammals and invertebrates that live amongst the tall grasses. Whilst Dave was still cutting, a fox came out into the open alongside him to search for voles.

There were a lot of rodents to find and the fox was burying them in shallow graves in the hope that other animals would not find them:

Magpies and crows were very interested in what was going on too. They were looking for food themselves but they also had their beady eyes on the fox – when it returns to its caches, it might find that they have been raided and the cupboards are bare.

Dave’s study looks out over the first meadow and we were both there when we spotted this buzzard flying in:

It then went down onto a new perch that we’ve just put up in the first meadow, surrounded by the cut grasses. As you can see, there is a camera trained on this perch, but it recorded nothing whatsoever of this very large bird sitting right in front of it. I am very unimpressed by that, but luckily we were watching from the house:

The kestrel has also been on the new perch, but she has found another way to avoid having her picture taken:

When I went through the other trail cameras, I saw that the buzzard had been on perches in the second meadow as well and had been pulling some dramatic moves:

The magpies and crows, self-appointed guardians of the meadows, still continue to keep this enormous bird of prey under close observation:

There is quite a lot of colour variation in buzzards and, looking back at my photos, this does seem to be the same bird that was with us throughout last winter.

It had been several months since a barn owl has appeared on the cameras, so I was very pleased to see one again this week:

Tawny owls have been around as well and this one ate a vole in front of a camera.

I’m so delighted that the meadows are providing food for all these birds of prey.

Watching the buzzard come down to the new perch wasn’t the only interesting thing that happened in Dave’s study this week. He was working on his tax return when a robin scuttled into the room as if it were a little mouse. The back door had been open but that is quite a long way from the study, so the whole thing was quite surprising and provided a most welcome distraction from the paperwork.

It is migration time out there and there are all sorts of warblers in our trees, hedgerows and appearing at the ponds.

Several stonechats have been seen on the perches or having a drink:

The Stonechat is a partial migrant – some stay in the UK for the winter whilst others migrate to Southern Europe or Northern Africa. This increases the chances of survival for at least some of the population should there be a migratory or winter catastrophe. But even the birds staying in the UK may move to more southerly parts of the country – for instance, Cumbrian-bred birds have apparently been proven to winter in Kent.

Back in the spring, I raised some sunflower seedlings to plant in our grandson’s garden so that he could watch them grow and be inspired. The seedlings that weren’t needed went into our allotment and are now putting on a very cheery autumnal show:

The sunflowers in the allotment are very popular with the bees, but a closer inspection showed that there were also many of these hyaline grass bugs, Liorhyssus hyalinus, on the flowers:

This next photo has been sent to me by our youngest daughter who is just back from holidaying in Mallorca, where she discovered this praying mantis, Mantis religiosa, on her sun lounger:

This iconic species is found throughout Europe and even on the Channel Islands, although not yet in mainland Britain. I wonder if, like the hyaline grass bug in the 1990s, it won’t be long before it gets itself across the Channel and finds that it quite likes it here.

I was very relieved to see all four badgers in this photo because it had been a while since I’ve seen more than three together and I was beginning to fear the worst:

For the last couple of mornings, one of the cubs has been coming out for a drink in the daylight:

I include this next photo even though its blurry because it is a good shot of their amazing claws:

If asked, I have always said that my favourite animal is the capybara, the World’s largest rodent. I find the sweet, gentle giant-ness of them very appealing, along with the fact that they live in family groups and only eat plants. But I had only ever experienced them from the other side of a fence at a zoo. This week, however, I booked myself onto a capybara experience at Wingham Wildlife Park near Canterbury.

Wingham Wildlife Park has a lot of interesting animals and we admired some of these on our way to the capybaras. Even though the chimpanzee enclosure was fantastically enormous, the animals chose to all cuddle up together on a single shelf:

And who doesn’t love a meerkat?

The Patagonian mara is another big South American rodent but nowhere near as large as a capybara

Coincidentally, capybaras have been in the news recently when one called Cinnamon escaped from her enclosure in a Shropshire zoo. Her adventures sparked nationwide, even global, interest before she was eventually recaptured unharmed and returned to her home.

There are four young capybaras at Wingham Wildlife Park and they are still by no means fully grown:

For half an hour I sat on a tree stump amongst the animals whilst the keeper gave out celery and beetroot treats and told me all about them.

It was all rather wonderful and I now have an even greater appreciation of this lovely species.

For the last few days, further progress on the cutting of the meadows has been stalled because we’ve been busy and the weather has been wet. However, things are looking up towards the end of the week and Thursday, Friday and Saturday are looking like possible tractor days. Will it be possible to have finished everything by close of play on Saturday? We will try our best to make that happen.

This week we attended a wildlife-friendly gardening event being held in association with Kent Wildlife Trust. We brought along some cork boards displaying a selection of our all-time favourite trail camera shots, capturing interesting animals and behaviours, which we hoped would inspire people to use trail cameras themselves and to record the wildlife that they will inevitably see.

Another stall at the open garden event was encouraging the people of Kent to set up Asian hornet lures and to report any sighings of this invasive species.

Here in East Kent we find ourselves on the front line in the fight to stop the Asian hornet from becoming established in the UK. It has already firmly ensconced itself in France and, as of 6th September, there have unfortunately been 50 UK sightings and 13 nests found here this year.

An extract from the UK rolling sightings tally for 2024 showing how Kent is very much in the forefront of this battle:

This bar chart of the 2023 nests found by county tells the same tale:

The Asian hornet preys on insects and is thought to represent a serious threat to our native pollinators, particularly bees and wasps.

Last November we were in the Champagne region of France to see the crane migration. Over the course of the week, our nature guide pointed out several Asian hornets flying around and he even found a nest five metres up in a tree:

On the stall at the open garden this week, they were recommending that we make up some hornet bait:

And pour it into a jam jar or similar with a wick to bring some of the bait up:

This bait will not pull hornets into the area that would not otherwise be there, but it should attract the interest of one that was casually passing by.

I have now prepared a Asian hornet lure and positioned it in the orchard with a trail camera on it:

Some of the liquid has dropped from the wick onto the table and butterflies have been appreciating it, but so far that is all:

Thankfully no Asian hornet has been spotted to date, but I did see this large hornet-mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, around the flowering ivy:

Last Christmas, our daughter-in-law created us an art-installation-cum-wildlife-habitat out of roof tiles that were left over from the building of the new garage:

This structure has been quietly lurking amongst the grasses this summer and no doubt all sorts of things will now be relishing the heat and protection of the tiles:

We had actual evidence of that this week when we saw four lizards basking there:

There can be quite a colour variation in viviparous lizards. Back in 2019 we kept on seeing a really green one in the paddock:

As usual, autumn arrives along with a flurry of jobs now needing our attention. At the very top of the list is getting the meadows harvested before the grasses become too wet to cut properly:

Frustratingly, this job has been delayed because the tractor got some grass in its fuel tank and had to go off on a flat-bed truck in disgrace to be worked on. But it’s back now and, once it stops raining, this job is a top priority.

Meanwhile, I have been dealing with the wild parsnip areas with a mixture of digging up and mowing down. We have been controlling wild parsnip growth in the meadows for a few years now because, not only is it a terrible thug, it also causes photo-sensitive rashes on human skin .

Another item on the list is to remove two years worth of reedy growth from the wild pond, before the male frogs start burying themselves into the mud at the bottom to hibernate – I wouldn’t want to squash them.

Badgers have their own autumn jobs to do and there has been a lot of bedding being dragged backwards into the sett to prepare their burrows for winter:

I pruned the new hedgerow last winter and that has made a big difference. It has taken a long time for it to establish itself on our thin, dry soils but it is finally starting to look like a worthy hedge:

A small section of the meadow has already been cut and that has attracted the attention of the raptors:

The kestrel herself is a regular and she has been catching voles. But here she has a dragonfly

Sparrowhawks are seen throughout the year, not just at meadow-cutting time, and they often adopt this amusing relaxation position:

This week we met up at the wood with the county recorder for reptiles and amphibians – he wanted to assess its potential for snakes, particularly adders. We had never seen a snake in the wood before, so what were the chances that we would disturb a large and vigorous grass snake sunbathing in a glade whilst he was with us? Well, this is indeed what happened and I am ashamed to say that it gave me such a shock that all I did was shriek, but the recorder was able to see that it was an adult female and was about a metre long. He also immediately submitted a record!

The snake was just to the right of this tree, warming up in a patch of sunlight. I have put a camera there now because apparently they will sometimes return to favoured basking sites:

Once it had seen us, the snake removed itself at speed to the shelter of a dead hedge that we had created when we opened up the glade the winter before last:

We had previously thought about woodland management with birds, dormice, plants and butterflies in mind but we had never before considered things with a snake hat on. We came away from the day with several ideas to better help British reptiles.

Our only other recent sighting of a grass snake was in a pool in West Blean Woods near Canterbury in July 2021:

There has been another unusual visitor to the wood:

September’s dormouse monitoring tour around the nest boxes took an exhausting six hours yesterday but, as I trudged back to the car, it was difficult not to also feel completely exhilarated by the number of dormice that had been found.

Dormice live in low densities and it was therefore a fantastic result to find nineteen dormouse nests in the boxes this month. Some of the nests were empty but we did find eighteen dormice, including this little chap who had unfortunately lost his tail:

Most of the dormice found were adults and many were paired up in fully-constructed nests, presumably ready to start a family. There could well be numerous litters of young to process on the October tour and I am already mentally preparing myself for a very long day.

As soon as we set off around the meadows with the dog on Friday morning, it was apparent that something momentous was going on with red admirals:

Hundreds if not thousands of red admirals had flown across The Channel and arrived in the meadows overnight, and were now fluttering out of the hedgerows and long grasses wherever we went.

It was difficult to take photographs to demonstrate the scale of the irruption:

I did take a very large number of photos, and even tried to get a bit arty:

Red admiral butterflies are migratory and travel northwards from North Africa and Continental Europe as the spring and summer proceed. The species overwinters as adults, and nearly all found in Britain will have migrated here because they are mostly unable to survive our winters. There is recent evidence, however, to suggest that some are now successfully getting through the winter in the extreme south of England.

Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory, just up the coast, post their daily sightings of butterflies and I could see that they, too, had had a big arrival of red admirals,

Whilst I was admiring these admirable admirals, I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen to them all, now that the summer was coming to an end and our unsurvivable winter was just around the corner. So I was very pleased to read that many do undertake a southerly migration back across The Channel before the end of autumn.

There were also quite a few painted ladies that had arrived along with the red admirals and these were the first painted ladies that we had seen all year:

In the sunshine of Saturday, we also saw our normal butterflies who must have been wondering what on earth was going on:

Both wasp spiders that I have been watching have now left their webs to build a cocoon somewhere close by, and we take that as our sign to commence cutting the meadows, mindful that there is a lot to do before the weather collapses into winter.

As always foxes, magpies, kestrels and many others are very interested to see if the cutting has thrown up any opportunities for them:

I spotted this large privet hawk-moth caterpillar clinging to Dave’s trousers as we were returning to the house one day:

They are the most amazing things. I was particularly taken with how the white slashes end with a series of spots:

Since Dave hadn’t been brushing up against any privet, we presumed that the caterpillar had wandered away from its larval food plant to look for somewhere to pupate. We decided that it was best to return it to some privet so that it could start its journey again, heading off where it wants to go

We have never found a privet hawk-moth caterpillar in the meadows before, but we often had the adults in the moth trap. It is the UK’s largest resident moth:

I also found this small purple-and-white caterpillar which is likely a lime-speck pug moth

Late summer is the time when slow worms ‘give birth’. I put this in commas because it is not the same as in mammals – slow worms incubate their eggs within their body and, once the eggs hatch, up to twelve young emerge from the female.

We haven’t seen any slow worm babies – or neonates as they are called – in the meadows yet, although I did find some in our daughter’s garden in the North Downs today:

Whilst we were looking under the reptile sampling squares in the meadows, hoping for neonate slow worms, we uncovered this vole. With that chestnutty colour and less rounded head shape, I believe that this is a bank vole rather than a short-tailed field vole:

We haven’t seen quite so much of the ringed kestrel this week, but her place has been taken by this sparrowhawk:

It’s always lovely to see sparrowhawks in flight:

They are magnificent birds, but I am less impressed with the sorry piles of feathers they leave in their wake:

Last week, a whinchat was seen in the meadows:

John the bird ringer has sent me a photo of a whinchat that he took recently at Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory, which more clearly shows what a young whinchat is like:

Other birds on passage have been seen at the wood:

Our resident birds are appearing on the cameras as well. Adult bullfinch have been in the wood all summer but now, for the first time this year, here is one of their young:

This next photo is a joyous mix of blue tit, great tit, marsh tit and song thrush:

And a tawny owl still continues to bath at this pond, even though the nights are now much cooler:

My last photo for today is of another neonate – our lovely little granddaughter who was born yesterday:

I can’t wait to start teaching her about the wildlife in the meadows and the wood, but she’s perhaps a little young at the moment.

As I walked round the meadows this morning, the sky was alive with house martins and there was a distinct autumnal nip to the air. Torrential rain fell over the second half of the weekend and now only a few butterflies are stuttering about under a glowering sky. Evidence of the changing of the season is everywhere, drawing a line under the summer. But in many ways autumn represents a fresh new start for us, with some exciting new wildlife projects being planned, and I am looking forward to it.

A short walk from home is Hawkshill Freedown, a lovely and historic 13.5 acres that is now being managed for nature, although it was the site of Walmer Aerodrome during the First World War. From here aircraft were scrambled to protect friendly shipping in the English Channel.

By the time the Second World War broke out, a grassy runway was no longer suitable for planes and the area was used for radar and signal-jamming purposes instead. The M Balloon Unit of the RAF was also based there to drop propaganda leaflets over Europe. In February 1944 alone, over five million leaflets were released over Germany and France by 2,478 balloons despatched from Walmer.

After the wars, the land returned to agriculture but Walmer Parish Council was able to buy 13.5 acres of it in 1999 to ensure its existence as an open space for the enjoyment of the community.

These days it is being managed by a team of volunteers with very much the same approach as we have for our meadows – but they must face many more challenges than we do. It’s a much larger site with public access and a lot of dogs. I imagine it must also be difficult to get cut material offsite as well as watering newly-planted trees.

But, despite all these issues, Hawkshill was looking fabulous when we walked up there one day this week:

Dave has an old book ‘Records of Walmer’ which was published in 1890, three years before the tower was built. It includes a plan of the new church, showing a spire on top of the tower:

There was a lovely mix of flowering plants at Hawshill and there seemed to be much more colour there than in our meadows by late summer. Another difference is that over the years we have become very wary of the thuggish tendencies of ragwort and particularly wild parsnip, and we go to great lengths to ensure that neither of these plant species sets seed here.

We have an area of dense wild parsnip growth in the first meadow and it has been kept it cut short all year so that we can contain it and keep it under observation. Any parsnip outside this area has been pulled up:

The yellow-flowered parsnips – which, as well as being scarily good at reproducing themselves, can cause a photo sensitive rash on human skin – are growing thickly in this cut area:

There are too many parsnip plants to pull them all up in one go, but the plan is to try to reduce the size of the rectangle each year by pulling the parsnips around the circumference. The remaining plants will be cut before too long, well before they go to seed, with the arisings being deposited onto a tarpaulin and then straight into the green waste bins to further ensure no seed is spread. All this elaborate work may seem a bit extreme, but demonstrates how alarmed we are by wild parsnip!

The hedgerows and trees surrounding the meadows have now produced their fruit and seeds:

There is scarcely any fruit at all on the hawthorn this year and very few sloes. But guelder rose berries, blackberries, rose hips and holm oak acorns are plentiful. Each year is so very different.

The large amount of ivy that we have in our hedgerows has come into flower, offering a seasonal bonanza of pollen and nectar. In the sunshine, vast numbers of insects are flocking to it.

The life cycle of the ivy bee, Colletes hederae, revolves around capitalising on this late-summer bounty. There are thousands of these bees here in the meadows at the moment:

It’s not just the ivy bees – all sorts of other insects are drawn in by the ivy:

As we are patrolling the hedgerows we also noticed a jersey tiger moth…

An adult and last instar box bug…

…and several speckled bush-crickets with their super-long antennae:

We went out with torches at night and discovered that a different set of ivy-enthusiasts were to be found in the dark.

It was lovely to see such a wide variety of moths such as the angle shades, straw underwing and setaceous Hebrew character shown here:

But the most interesting thing of all on our trip out at night was to finally see some adult black vine weevils, Otiorhynchus sulcatus. A section of ivy near the house had loads of them:

A second wasp spider has been discovered in the meadows. It’s good to spot them because we will then ensure that the grasses aren’t cut in a wide circumference round the web to safeguard the overwintering cocoon. I have been calling by both webs every day to see what the large lady spiders have been catching in their webs. They are grasshopper specialists but I haven’t seen either of the spiders with one of these this year:

I wonder why they are not catching grasshoppers this year? Is it a web placement issue, or perhaps a bad year for grasshoppers and crickets? The wasp spider I was watching last year was incredibly successful in comparison to these two, and hapless invertebrates were pinging into her web right, left and centre. A large number of silken threads come out of her abdomen at the same time, meaning she can wrap up and immobilise her prey very rapidly indeed:

I have been noticing bats flying along the hedgerows when going out at dusk to put the peanuts down for the foxes and badgers. Our bat detector was dug out and readied for action:

We ventured out on another still evening to see if we could work out what species of bats were about:

It was exhilarating to both see the bat and now hear it as well, once the detector was tuned in to its correct wave frequency. We were hearing the bats at 45kHz which we think makes them common pipistrelles. We also heard a call briefly at 55kHz, so there could well be soprano pipistrelles flying as well.

I find bats so intriguing because they are so difficult to get to know. You only get the briefest of glimpses and I am not even completely sure what they look like up close. Here is a photo from Wiki Commons of a common pipistrelle that has unfortunately grounded:

We do have several bat boxes up around the property but have plans to get a few more up this winter:

Due to a housekeeping oversight, I found myself with quite a few slightly out-of-date eggs which I put out one evening along with the peanuts. Foxes love eggs and this one quickly started to take away as many as possible before the badgers turned up:

However, it hadn’t managed to get them all away before the badgers arrived. Foxes are very respectful of badgers and wait in the wings for the badgers to eat their fill. But the lure of the eggs was too much this time:

I love the way that the fox is almost tiptoeing in on bended legs in the hope that it won’t be noticed.

My final photo today is of a whinchat. This bird breeds in upland areas of northern and western Britain and briefly stopped at the meadows this week on its journey south to central and southern Africa for the winter.

This is a red-listed bird in the UK with its numbers having more than halved between 1995 and 2008, although the causes are unknown. I wish it every luck on its long journey.