The spring of 2024 was quite mild in East Kent, but it was also pretty wet and overcast. The summer that followed was a bit cooler than average and, most importantly for us, had just about enough rain to stop the ponds from fully drying out.

We have been managing the meadows for a decade now and it’s interesting how different every one of those years has been. Weather plays a big part in this, but we hope that our meadow management is also having a positive impact as we strive to do the best for this lovely piece of land.

Here is a summary of the highs and the lows of the meadows in 2024:

1. Birds

In 2023 a pair of swifts took up residence in one of the swift nest boxes attached to the house. They must have been two-year-old birds since they didn’t breed but just bagged the box for themselves by staying in there for a long time. They then left to migrate back to Africa in late July.

We had really hoped that we would see them again in 2024 and it was a truly exciting moment when, on 17th May, they both arrived back into the box:

By this point Dave had managed to set up a camera in the box, but the quality of the pictures wasn’t that great. We will try to upgrade the camera for the 2025 swift season.

Swifts eat, drink and sleep on the wing, so it is a real privilege to be able to view them at their nest which is the only time in their lives that they stop flying

The pair went on to build a nest from feathers that they had caught in mid air, which were then stuck together with saliva. On 27th May the first egg was laid, followed by a second one two days later:

After the second egg was laid, the adult birds took it in turns to incubate the eggs while the other went out to feed, but both birds were always together in the box overnight. The eggs would have hatched around the 17th June, nineteen days after incubation started, but we were away on holiday until a few days later. We returned home, full of anxious anticipation to see how the swifts were getting on, and were elated to find two chicks contentedly sitting in the nest:

Each time an adult returned to the nest, its throat bulging with a ball of insects caught in flight, mayhem broke out as the chicks scrabbled to be the one to get the food. Here is the successful chick being fed:

We thought the chicks looked like little penguins at this stage, with their tail and flight feathers still in their protective sheaths:

By 16th July, it was getting pretty crowded in the box at night when all four of the birds were in there:

The chicks continued to grow and, by 23rd July, were stretching out their wings and preparing to fly:

They were also showing interest in the big wide world outside the box:

On 29th July, the first young bird fledged leaving one solitary chick in the box:

But the remaining bird then also left the next morning and our swift year had come to an end.

Throughout most of 2023 and into the beginning of 2024 we had builders in to work on the house and also to build a new garage and wildlife tower in the front garden. The tower was to contain two swift boxes but this last remaining job still hadn’t been completed by the beginning of May 2024, when the swifts were expected to return any day. Luckily our builder was always very sympathetic to our wildlife-related requests and returned do the last bits on the tower in the nick of time:

With the tower now finished, loud calls were played through the entrance holes while the birds were in the country. In mid July it was very gratifying to see groups of swifts circling the tower in response to this. I hope that they spotted the holes and will be back to nest there soon, although it did take four or five years until we had success with the boxes that are attached to the house.

Hobbies migrate to and from Africa along with the swifts, using the birds as a mobile larder. Once they arrive back in the UK, they switch from eating swifts to catching dragonflies on the wing. The bird ringers had seen hobbies over the meadows previously but this photo, taken on 27th May, was the first time that one had appeared on the cameras:

The successful breeding of a pair of swifts rather grabbed our 2024 avian headlines, but other interesting birds have been around throughout the year. Woodcock are often seen in the meadows in the winter:

Yellowhammer always start to gather at the end of winter:

But unfortunately this year there were no yellowhammer breeding territories here as far as we could tell. In previous springs the sound of yellowhammers singing from their favourite perches around the hedgerows became part of the soundscape, but in 2024 they were sadly silent. I hope that this was just a blip rather than a downward trend and that things will return to normal next spring.

In contrast, lots of starlings fledged here this year, whereas there had been none at all in evidence the year before:

Magpies also had a very successful breeding season as usual. There are far too many of them around for my liking:

I presume that herring gulls are nesting on the nearby white cliffs because we often see them gathering nesting material here:

Every year a pair of mallards come for some recuperation on our ponds. The female duck lays eight to thirteen large eggs over two weeks but is weakened by this energy-intensive process. So the male accompanies her wherever she goes to protect her whilst she is egg-laying. I find this very endearing.

The mallards only fly in to use the ponds and do not nest in the meadows. Any birds that do nest here have to contend with all our magpies and crows, who are very partial to a nutritious bird egg or chick:

We don’t often see siskin in the meadows:

Nor do we usually see stonechat:

For a while this partially leucistic jay was often appearing on the cameras:

Autumn is always an exciting time. Migrating birds stop over on their way out of the country:

It is also the season that the meadows get their annual cut. This exposes the small rodents, reptiles and invertebrates that had been living amongst the grasses and several species of birds of prey arrive to take advantage of this.

A kestrel, ringed in the meadows in September 2019, often hunts here and she has a surprisingly varied diet. She has a lizard below:

And a great green bush cricket here:

And also a mouse:

But she was most frequently seen eating an awful lot of voles. The vole population is cyclical with booms and busts, and 2024 did seem a particularly good year for them.

A barn owl was first seen in the meadows in the autumn of 2023, but this year the cameras had barn owls on them every night for a few weeks. I was delighted to notice that one bird had a ring on its right leg but another one definitely didn’t, which confirmed that there were two separate birds visiting. Here they both are putting their right legs forward for consideration:

Following this discovery that there were actually two barn owls, we have put a barn owl nest box up because wouldn’t it be fantastic to have nesting owls here someday?

The buzzard is another bird of prey that first landed in the meadows in 2023 and it was a regular visitor this autumn as well:

Its presence makes the magpies feel very uneasy though, and these photos make me smile:

As the autumn rolled on into winter, the birds of prey started to be seen less frequently. This most unwelcome visitor arrived instead and started to pull hibernating frogs out of the mud at the bottom of both ponds:

We have learned to be very wary of a grey heron because it’s just such an efficient hunter. A few years ago one cleared the wild pond of all its hundreds of frogs and newts as they gathered to mate, which was heart-breaking.

So we got our old scarecrow MacKenzie out of the shed and also built a second one, now called Dude, to stand sentinel by the side of both ponds:

The scarecrows have proved completely successful so far and the heron has not returned since they went out.

This brings me to the end of my review of the birds in the meadows in 2024. The year has been especially memorable for the breeding swifts and the influx of autumn raptors, but there has been a lot of other bird interest too. Part 2 of the review of the meadows, which will cover everything else, will arrive in the new year once I’ve written it!

Have a really Happy New Year from all in the meadows and let’s see what 2025 brings.

In the depths of these short winter days, when it’s cold and dark by 4 o’clock, it’s always such a pleasure to draw the curtains, put some music on and rummage through the photographs of the year, back to those halcyon days when the sun shone and there were interesting insects and young animals about. There are difficult decisions to be made about which photos will make the cut and be included in this summary of the last twelve months in the wood. Since taking on twelve acres of woodland five years ago, we have been on a journey of discovery, each year gaining a greater depth of understanding of how everything works and fits together, and here are my highlights for 2024:

1. Birds

At the edge of the wood there is an old cherry tree, speckled with multiple woodpecker holes, that has provided much interest over the years. In April the ground at the base of the tree was covered in wood chippings suggesting that some major excavation was going on in the trunk above:

We put a camera on a likely hole and were rewarded with many views of green woodpeckers releasing beakfuls of sawdust to float down to the ground:

We kept the camera trained on the hole and eventually started to see chicks looking out. How many were in there, though?

There were at least two of them:

But, in mid June, it was actually three chicks that successfully fledged:

And then, in August, we were delighted to see one of the spotty young birds out in the wood with its father:

Together with a neighbouring woodland, our wood is part of the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme and there are fifty dormouse nest boxes spaced throughout both woods which are surveyed monthly from April to November. Blue tits also like to use these boxes and, in May, twenty-five of the boxes contained blue tit nests:

The hole into the box is small and we had thought that blue tits and wrens were the only birds that could get into the box. This year, though, box 12 had something a bit more exciting going on – a brood of marsh tits, all of which fledged soon after this photo was taken:

I stumbled upon a brood of adorable just-fledged wrens in May. This one stayed around just long enough for me to take a photo:

Despite initially showing a lot of interest, the tawny owls lost out to the squirrels and did not nest in the tawny nest box again this year:

But we did see a lot of them at the ponds throughout the summer and what absolutely fabulous birds they are:

The bird list for the wood is not massive, but two new species were added this year, grey wagtail and firecrest, bringing the total to forty-five:

2. Woodland Mammals

2024 was the year that I finally obtained a dormouse disturbance licence from Natural England after several years of training. I can now legally check dormouse nest boxes unsupervised and don’t have to take up any more of my trainer’s time, although I will certainly miss her company.

It was quite a chilly spring and we found lots of torpid dormice – in April there were four and in May we found an amazing twelve torpid dormice in the boxes:

In June I did the tour of the boxes with another dormouse expert who was then prepared to be a second signatory on my disturbance licence application. On this tour we found a dead dormouse in one of the boxes, complete with this beautiful sexton beetle who would have been trying to bury the carcass had it been on the ground rather than in a box:

This dormouse, who had lost his tail, was found on the September tour:

Dormice live in low densities within a woodland, but nonetheless eighteen of them and many more empty nests were in the boxes in September, suggesting that the woods are wonderfully rich in dormice.

Every spring I put a camera on a hole in the ground that was used as a fox den back in 2022. This year there were some sweet baby rabbits living down there:

The foxes went elsewhere to raise their young:

The camera looking at the green woodpecker nest also caught some other interesting things:

2024 was a terrible year for squirrel damage to the trees with so many lovely beech and hornbeam being ringbarked and lost. I wasn’t at all pleased by this sight either in the tawny nest box where we were hoping to get nesting owls:

Although the main badger sett is elsewhere in the wider wood, we still see quite a lot of badger activity in our section. In all my years of using trail cameras to watch wildlife at ponds, I’ve never before seen a badger take a bath. This one had a good long wallow in the shallow pond and rubbed itself along the grass to dry off afterwards:

Badgers have a fine set of teeth as demonstrated in a skirmish here:

And here is one of this year’s cubs out in the daylight:

There were several sightings of polecat-sized mustelids during the year but the photos were never clear enough to be able to accurately assess their heritage:

There was also a much smaller weasel seen:

3. Reptiles and Amphibians

In September we showed the Kent County Recorder for reptiles and amphibians around the wood so he could assess it for its potential. As we entered a clearing that was made a couple of years previously, we surprised an adult female grass snake who was basking in the sun. She was over a metre long with a yellow collar and shot off in a tight S shape, giving me an enormous shock. We had never seen a snake in the wood or in the meadows before.

In January we found a toad hibernating under a sheet of corrugated iron which was very pleasing because this was a new species for the wood. We have now found it back in the same place this winter as well:

4. Invertebrates

The wood is covered in primroses in the spring which is a gloriously uplifting sight after the long winter. Primroses have long flower tubes with the nectar held at the very bottom, so it is solely long-tongued insects that can get at it. In the wood in March, only bee-flies and brimstone butterflies are on the wing and have a sufficient length of tongue:

Bugle is another spring flower much beloved by insects and there is now a lot of it growing in the wood as we create more clearings:

One clearing has marjoram flowering abundantly in the high summer and this plant is a big attraction for woodland butterflies. The silver-washed fritillary is probably the most exciting:

The sycamores’ leaves were covered in pale mottling this summer, caused by a tiny sycamore-specialist leafhopper, Eurhadina loewi, which could be seen on the undersides of the leaves and which seemed to have a bumper year in 2024:

This nationally scarce beetle, Oedemera femoralis, is a nocturnal beetle feeding on the pollen and nectar of ivy and willow. This one was found sheltering in a dormouse box during the day:

This is the first time I had seen a 14-spot ladybird. Several of the spots have fused together and it now looks for all the world like a grinning panda:

I love learning about the wacky lifecycles that many invertebrates have and this fly, Dryomyza anilis, is a badger latrine specialist. The males are territorial and guard their chosen latrines from other males as they wait for a female to come by.

We are hoping that 2025 will be a significant year in our woodland journey. We are going to commission a management plan from a forestry expert which will guide us through the next few years. The plan may well recommend cutting down the big but beautiful stand of silver birch in the centre of the wood that has reached maturity and could soon start to fall over – I am trying to prepare myself for this, but I love those trees.

So that completes my review of this year in the wood. All that is left now is to wish you a Happy Christmas – I hope you have a good one.

Our son and daughter-in-law visited us recently and brought us a very precious gift – some bunting that they had created along with one of their friends which features some of the animals from this blog. They had made lino cuts and then printed these onto paper – it must have taken them ages and I am totally delighted with it.

Six of the prints feature animals that have captured the headlines of the blog in 2024. Throughout the summer, dormice appeared in excellent numbers in the wood and green woodpeckers fledged three chicks from a hole in an old cherry tree:

Swifts raised two young in a swift box attached to the house and we saw a large and vigorous grass snake in the wood for the first time:

A pair of barn owls hunted in the meadows this autumn and our badgers had three cubs back in the spring:

It’s been another wonderful wildlife year and I am looking forward to reviewing it all properly as December comes to a close.

In the meantime, we have had another exciting first:

Never before have we seen a hedgehog in the garden. Over the past decade there have been very occasional sightings on the trail cameras in the meadows – not even as often as one a year – and never has one been spotted in the wood. It is safe to say that any glimpse of a hedgehog here is a momentous occasion. But when I was a child in Maidenhead in the 60s, they were such a normal sight that we ceased to really notice them. These maps from hedgehogstreet.org aren’t necessarily completely accurate but paint a pretty depressing picture of the UK’s hedgehogs:

However, amongst all that gloom, there is a small sliver of good news. It has been recently reported that, whilst rural hedgehog populations still continue to fall, urban populations may now have stabilised and might even be increasing. By improving connectivity between our gardens, not using harmful chemicals and putting hibernation boxes into our shrubberies, the householders of Britain could perhaps reinforce and improve this small recovery.

This particular householder has now positioned a hedgehog box into the base of a privet hedge just in case it could ever be of any use to our prickly friends:

We have gone round and removed old bird nests from most of the bird boxes in the meadows:

Something catastrophic must have happened with this blue tit nest that sadly got no further than the egg laying stage:

This is a vey cosy nest using all sorts of synthetic fluff, including yellows and pinks from the dog’s balls:

This next nest completely filled the box with the hole facing forwards. I am not completely sure what bird made this nest but the nesting material is quite coarse and my best guess is a house sparrow:

Pleasingly, nearly all of the boxes had a nest in them this year. Even those that didn’t have nests are now making themselves useful as overnight roosts on these cold winter nights:

One evening, it was nearly dark and I was drawing the curtains when I noticed this house sparrow entering a swift box to roost overnight:

Back in February 2021 there was a severe cold snap and Dave spotted a wren roosting in this novelty teapot bird box when he was out with the dog and a torch before bed. We put a camera on the box and discovered that it was going into the teapot at heavy dusk and leaving just before dawn each night:

I only have slim pickings to offer you from the trail cameras this week. A tawny owl, sparrowhawk and kestrel in the meadows…..

And a redpoll and a firecrest in the wood:

We had heard that the RSPB had decided to close the visitor centre and shop at their Dungeness reserve in the new year as a cost cutting measure and we wanted to see it for the last time before things changed. We once saw a pair of bittern flying past us there and this remains one of our most memorable bird sightings of all time.

Everyone we met was talking with sadness about the closure of the visitor centre and, once we got out onto the reserve itself, we found that several of the hides had been replaced with cheaper lookouts as well:

However, there were clear signs that one new hide is about to arrive which was good news – it can get very cold indeed at Dungeness:

Also very cheering was that a great deal of work is ongoing to create new islands in front of two of the remaining hides, Christmas Dell and Dengemarsh:

We noticed that the islands on the reserve are now protected with floating fences:

These fences were designed in Denmark and have been found to be very good at keeping mammals off the islands, thus protecting breeding seabirds. It is a rope with floats attached to make it buoyant and it is anchored in a number of places to keep it from moving. The predator mammal swims up to the rope but is unable to lever itself over it and most will not swim under it. Cheap, simple, unobtrusive and apparently effective.

It was a dull, grey day and we didn’t actually see many birds on our visit this time, other than the thousands of cormorants. We did see a few marsh harriers though:

And a great white egret:

So it is a time of great change at RSPB Dungeness. I completely understand that the charity needs to spend its limited funds wisely and I presume that this is what has motivated its closures. But the new islands and rafts that it has planned should be great once they are established and are a really positive thing. We will certainly return soon to see how things are getting on and, of course, we are forever hopeful of seeing those bittern again..

It was with great excitement that we first saw a barn owl in the meadows during the autumn of 2023. This autumn we have realised that there are now two barn owls hunting here, one with a ring on its right leg and the other without. Here they both are, putting their right legs forwards for inspection:

As soon as I knew that there were two of them, I could no longer resist ordering a barn owl nest box because I am forever an optimist in such matters. This box has now arrived and, like the two we already have up in the wood, it is very roomy and made out of sturdy recycled plastic:

A good site for the box in a copse of trees between the two meadows had been identified which would have a clear view out over the second meadow once we’ve hacked everything back a bit:

The heavy box was hauled into position with a mixture of winching up on a rope and pushing from below:

And here is our new barn owl home, ready for viewing by prospective tenants:

In the autumn, barn owls were appearing on the cameras every night. They are being seen much less frequently now, but are still occasionally here and I hope they might notice the new box:

A camera is now trained onto the box so, if there is any interest, we will know:

As we were working in the copse, a little chiffchaff was flitting in the trees above our heads, searching for insects. Although most chiffchaffs leave Britain in the autumn to overwinter in`Southern Europe and North Africa, an increasing number are now staying here instead, as I suppose this one must be:

We have bought a new trail camera, a Browning Recon Force Elite HP5, which is more than double the price of the Crenovas that we usually use. It has only just gone out into the meadows, but this seems to be a reasonable shot to have taken in pretty poor weather:

I am pleased to report that there have been no further heron sightings since the scarecrows went into action at both ponds:

Sparrowhawks have been very much in evidence this week:

And the ringed kestrel as well:

Tawny owls are being seen and heard too:

In the wood, we are hoping that the tawny owls will nest in this box next year. They nested in here in 2022 but have lost out to squirrels since then. Nice to see one showing an interest now though and hope that we will be lucky again in 2025:

The winter work in the wood kicked off this week with a first session of clearing the marjoram glade. Every year we cut down the dogwood that grows strongly there because, if left, it would quickly overwhelm all the wonderful marjoram. The dogwood has grown vigorously and tall this year but is still easily sliced through with the hedge cutter:

Bringing in the woodland butterflies and moths to the marjoram is what it is all about, and here are some that we have seen in previous summers:

Progress was made this week but it is quite a large area and it will take three or four more sessions before this job is completed:

As we worked, the winter sun was shining on the surrounding silver birch trees that are already covered in catkins. Now that the trees have dropped their leaves, the catkins will release pollen that can waft around freely, unimpeded by the foliage.

We were under observation by a little robin as we laboured on:

And the dog was quietly supervising from the comfort of back of the car:

I hate to see this poor chaffinch with what I think must be Chaffinch Viral Papilloma on its foot and leg. I’m not sure I’ve seen one as badly affected as this before:

The days are depressingly short at this time of this year, but this does have the benefit that we are awake to see the glorious sunrises over the sea such as this one this week:

Only another sixteen days now until we are over the tipping point and inexorably heading towards spring.