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.