Newts and Owls

~ judyheiser

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:

Here she is again but this time with a great green bush cricket, still living amongst the uncut grasses. An Orthoptera website tells me that the adult crickets are around from late July until early winter:
A sparrowhawk is shrouding the prey that it has caught:
A sparrowhawk launch

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?

The camera that I am calling unreliable did really rather well with this photo

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

A ghostly barn owl catches a vole in the gloming
It’s got such long legs

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:

Wye, at the top left of this map, is a lovely rural village, surrounded by the North Downs and with the River Stour running through it. Notice also Port Lympne safari park at the bottom where we also went this week

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:

It is estimated that six million of these birds are released into the British countryside to be shot each year and I find it difficult not to be appalled by that number

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:

It was so much bigger and blacker than the smooth newts we are used to in the meadows. During the breeding season, a male will also have a long wavy crest along his body and tail. Their granular appearance is because they have glands in their skin which release toxins to deter predators
Each individual newt has a unique pattern of spots on its tummy

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

Newt refuge in the hedgerow and now containing the rescued newt

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 spindly long-bodied cellar spider is feasting on a much larger spider

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.

I read that the long-bodied cellar spider’s taste for other spiders makes it very beneficial to humans in Australia because they will prey upon highly venomous redback spiders who also like to live in homes

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:

It’s impossible not to be impressed by its heft and its power

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.

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