Autumn is great time of year for birds of prey around here and several have been displaying their hunting prowess this week.

The ringed kestrel has been patrolling the meadows since 2019 and here she is now with a mouse:

She has also caught several voles:

I took this photo through the kitchen window early one morning as I was making a cup of tea. The trail camera that is slap bang in front of her failed to take a single photo though – it does seem to be a bit unreliable:

The buzzard has been in the meadows this week but we’ve never seen it with any prey. I wonder if it eats what it has caught whilst still down on the ground rather than carrying it back up onto a perch?

A barn owl is hunting in the meadows most nights and it takes its prey back to various perches to eat:

But it was only when it landed on this gate, where the camera is quite close, that we noticed that it is a ringed bird:

John, the bird ringer, is very involved with barn owls in East Kent and tells me that there are many owl boxes locally where he rings the chicks, and this could well be one of his. He has suggested that we put a nest box up on a pole in the second meadow to see if this owl can be persuaded to roost or even breed here. This definitely sounds like a fun winter project and I will get onto it straight away.

We continue to see a lot of this partly leucistic jay:

It is a busy time of the year for jays as they collect and bury the acorns from the holm oaks. They are also always very enthusiastic bathers:

Juvenile herring gulls are still closely shadowing their parents to learn the ropes. The adult now has its winter grey speckling on its head

It was our grandson Kit’s second birthday recently and we were invited to a party at his home in Wye:

Kit’s toys were all joining in the birthday fun too:

Whilst we were at the party, a small group of red-legged partridge crossed their lawn and it was lucky that I had brought my proper camera along:

Amazingly, a great crested newt was then found trapped in a bucket that it had fallen into and couldn’t get out of. We had never seen one of these large and endangered newts before:

Co-incidentally, I had just bought two newt refuges to put in their hedgerows because I knew there was a population of great crested newts in the village and I wanted to see one. Therefore we were able to release the newt into the refuge to give it some safe shelter until dark

Due to enormous declines in range and abundance, the great crested newt is strictly protected by law, making it an offence to harm, capture or even disturb them and to damage their habitat. If we hadn’t been rescuing the newt from the bucket, presumably we shouldn’t have been handling it at all.

We had all five of our children and their partners staying this weekend and I noticed a fascinating David and Goliath moment in the corner of the conservatory whilst preparing it for lunch. The long-bodied cellar spider, Pholcus phalangioides, is not native to the UK and can only survive here in our houses and sheds.

The cellar spider does spin a web but, if nothing lands in it, it can venture away to go off hunting for other spiders that are sitting on their own webs or lurking in a crevice.

Over in the wood, squirrels are collecting nuts:

Its unusual to see a nuthatch down at the ponds:

And a pair of bullfinch at a mini pond:

The tawny owls have already started to check out the tawny box in preparation for next year’s breeding season. But will they manage to beat back the squirrels this time?

And they still continue to regularly come to this pond to bathe even though it is no longer warm:

This week we visited another of East Kent’s zoos, Port Lympne Safari Park, run by the Aspinall Foundation. Here we saw this magnificent gorilla in its reassuringly enormous enclosure:

The Aspinall Foundation, which runs two zoos in East Kent, has sent over seventy zoo-bred gorillas back into the wild:

This scheme is controversial, with some people questioning if this is an effective conservation tool. I currently don’t know enough to take an informed stance in either camp but I find it all very interesting and will try to find out more.

The forecasted string of beautiful autumnal days has come and gone but the second meadow remains steadfastly uncut. The tractor once more stopped working and there has had to be another delay while expert help was called in.

The good news is that Dave had pretty much finished the first meadow before things went wrong:

Birds, as well, are interested to see what the cutting has to offer them:

The cutting has exposed a nest of german wasps, Vespula germanica, deep within an old rodent hole:

Whenever we have found wasp nests in the meadows before, they have been nests of the common wasp, Vespula vulgaris, so I was pleased to be able to add another species to the list. German wasps are quite plentiful in the south of England and they have surely been around here, but I’ve just never properly identified them before.

This very useful poster refreshed my memory of what the differences are between the common and the German wasp:

The most telling difference between the two species is that the common wasp has a black anchor shape on its face as shown by the photo below taken by a Dr. W. Stickling, who clearly has a much better camera than me:

Our german wasps in the rodent burrow don’t have an anchor on their faces:

Soil is being excavated from the hole, although they don’t have long before the cold will kill all of these wasps off, other than the newly-hatched queens who will fly off to find somewhere with a constant temperature to hibernate.

The annual cut is a fundamental part of meadow management, but it undeniably also causes immense collateral damage to the invertebrate and small mammal populations that live amongst the long vegetation. A benefit of the delay in the cutting of the second meadow has been that these species have all had a bit longer to complete their life cycles.

Wild carrot grows well here and by this time of year the flower heads have closed up to form a tight purse containing their seeds:

These purses are safe oases for all sorts of invertebrates and, if you gently prise the seed heads open, they can be found sheltering within:

There will be many more invertebrates living amongst and within the plant stems as well, and all of these will be wiped out when the meadows are cut. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable, if the meadows are to remain as flowery grassland. But because we want some of these invertebrates to survive, we leave at least a third of both meadows uncut on a rotational basis every year. Anthills and grass tussocks also develop in the uncut areas which are important micro-habitats and provide cover for reptiles and ground nesting birds. It’s all quite a delicate balance and who knows if we get it right, but every year we try.

Birds, too, have been enjoying what the long grasses still have to offer. Flocks of goldfinch rise and fall across the meadows as they feed on uncut thistle heads:

The kestrel has been busy catching great green bush-crickets, living amongst the uncut vegetation. This gallery of photos shows her eating three, but I have seen her with five in total. She has quite a taste for them:

These bush-crickets are large – this female we came across last year was about 7cm long:

The kestrel eats a surprising number of invertebrates – we have previously also seen her with bumblebees and dragonflies.

Another benefit of the delay in the cut is that Dave has had time to continue his excellent work in the pond:

It’s been years since this pond has been as clear of vegetation as this. It’s going to look great next year but I do worry that there is less protection for the frogs and newts from the herons.

The agricultural equipment supplier near Canterbury who services the tractor came to have a look at it and found that there was a big wodge of grass in the cutting deck that was stopping the blades rotating, something that was very quick and easy to fix. Dave was given advice on how to avoid this happening again, so we live and we learn.

With the tractor now sorted, work is once more underway although there is still a lot to do:

There have been some other interesting photos this week:

Winter is approaching and the badgers have been occupied with dragging fresh bedding into their sett underground:

One of this year’s sweet cubs continues to come out in the daylight:

Over the covid years, I threw myself into mothing, running the trap at least once a week and spending hours pouring over the field guides, trying to work out what I’d caught. Since then, I’ve scarcely run the trap at all, but decided to do so one night this week. I’d noticed that my computer’s AI seems pretty competent with moths and I wanted to give it a proper test out because it might save a lot of time.

Sixty-nine moths of thirteen species were in the trap by the morning and I did indeed find the AI really helpful at jogging my rusty memory. There were also a few species that I hadn’t seen before and the computer thought it knew what they were. Once I had checked everything in the book, I discovered that the computer was correct and that this is going to be really useful. I now hope to recommence full-scale mothing operations in 2025.

The delicate is a migrant moth and there were twenty-seven of them in the trap. The L-album wainscot likes damp coastal habitats and its over-wintering caterpillars feed on a variety of grasses

Other things also turn up in the trap sometimes. This is a tawny cockroach, one of our native species of cockroach that thankfully live outside and are not household pests:

Burnished brass moths are lovely little things and are often in the moth trap over the summer:

Frogs will be going into hibernation before too long – some of them in the mud at the bottom of the pond that Dave has now cleared – but this male was sitting on the garden steps one drizzly night when the dog went out for a last mooch before bed:

I do often include photos of sparrowhawks clenching their claws because I find it a comical thing for an otherwise quite scary bird to be doing. I was intrigued to see the buzzard, on the left below, doing the same thing this week:

A little robin was helping Dave cut the hedge up by the drive…

…and a beautiful young siskin was down by the wild pond:

A partially leucistic jay has been bathing in this tray most days:

And this is an unusual image of a crow:

My sister’s house in Berkshire is in the middle of farmland, with polytunnels all around her growing soft fruit. She has bats in her attic and red kites nesting in her trees, but she has never before had a polecat in her living room as she did this week:

I do hope that the cut of the meadows will now soon be completed. But for that to happen, we will need the weather to improve and dry the grasses. But good weather was definitely not what the BBC was forecasting for today:

Hurricane force winds from the north-east at 654 mph was a certainly a bit of a shock and the BBC obviously has a problem. But, in reality, today is calm and sunny and it definitely looks like a tractor day once the meadows have dried up a bit. It has all been a bit stressful this year but now we hope the end is in sight.