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.