We certainly would not have chosen to make our winter visit to Elmley Nature Reserve during Storm Herminia. It was especially unfortunate because we were bringing our son and daughter-in-law with us to introduce them to all the wonderful wildlife that seeks sanctuary on the reserve over the winter months.

Twenty-five short-eared owls have been regularly roosting in a field alongside the reserve car park and I was hoping that we would get some really good views. As well as that, large numbers of marsh harriers would no doubt be gathering at the reedbeds to roost at dusk, which is always quite a sight. But unfortunately things didn’t go to plan and Storm Herminia raged her way across southern Britain for most of our stay, bringing with her strong winds and a lot of rain. It was raining heavily at dusk and we definitely did not see the harrier roost and nor did we see a single short-eared owl.

But despite all this wild weather, we still managed to have an enjoyable time.

At first we trudged around in the rain getting very wet, but the birds were sensibly hunkered down and very little was seen:

Warming up in the cow byre over lunch:

There is a two mile track through the marsh between the reserve entrance gate and the car park. You are requested to stay in your car and think of it as a safari, using the vehicle as a mobile hide. We decided that viewing the birds from the shelter of the car might be the best way to spend the afternoon in the circumstances, so we turned the heated seats in the Volvo up to max and took ourselves off on a marshland safari:

But the standout birding highlight for me was this long-eared owl roosting in a thicket by the car park:

Although I knew that there were long-eared owls on the reserve, I hadn’t expected to see one because they roost in dense cover and generally only emerge after dark.

Owls hate the wind and the rain and so, in the midst of Storm Herminia as we were, we failed to see the three species of owl that I had hoped to spot. Last January there had been plenty of short-eared owls on show:

We have seen barn owls on every other visit to Elmley:

A pair of little owls live amongst the ruins of the Old Schoolhouse and are ordinarily very easy to see:

The fifth and final British owl species is the tawny owl, but this owl is a woodland specialist and is only occasionally seen or heard in the marshland habitat at Elmley.

We do, however, regularly see tawny owls at our wood and in the meadows. For the sake of completeness, here are tawny owls that have appeared on our trail cameras this week:

We spent the night in adjacent shepherds huts whilst the tempest howled outside:

We awoke the next morning to some sunshine, although it remained very windy:

After breakfast we walked down to the bird hides, enjoying the sun but still battling against the wind:

Marsh harriers and kestrels were frequently seen over the marsh during our stay. There was also this buzzard:

As it flew, we saw that it had caught itself a bird:

It was still very windy down at the hides and few birds were about. However, it was nice to see some grey plover:

And a small group of snipe:

By the end of our trip, we had chalked up forty-six species of bird which is not bad given the state of the weather. But there is no doubt that Elmley had not been seen at its best, and I hope that our son and daughter-in-law will be prepared to give it another chance sometime soon.

We ourselves are already booked to return in May. The short-eared owls will be gone but there should be baby birds everywhere.

We spent last weekend in the only remaining working semaphore tower in the country. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo and amidst concern about a possible French invasion, it was part of a chain of fifteen semaphore stations stretching the seventy-five miles from Admiralty House in London down to the Naval fleet in Portsmouth.

At the top of the tower is a mast with two pivoted arms that can spell words out by semaphore as illustrated by this poster below:

Between 1822 and 1847 there would be two people working in the tower during daylight hours, one looking through a telescope to the next tower to the north and the other looking at the one to the south. When all went well, the Navy could send a message between London and Portsmouth in fifteen minutes. However, electric telegraph was invented in 1839 which eventually superseded the need for the semaphore system and the towers were decommissioned.

After that time, Chatley Heath tower was used to house the families of estate workers, but it had fallen empty by 1963. Then, in 1984, it was gutted by a devastating fire. Although Surrey County Council repaired it, by the start of the 21st century water was getting in and threatening its structural integrity. Its future was looking very uncertain.

But the good news is that the Landmark Trust now cares for Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower. This charity rescues and sympathetically restores buildings at risk and then lets them out for self-catering holidays, using the income to pay for any future maintenance costs. The necessary restoration work began on the tower in early 2020, a few weeks before the pandemic struck, but the tower did eventually open to paying guests in the summer of 2021.

The Chatley Heath tower was the junction for a second branch of stations going down to Plymouth but this line was never completed:

The building has a basement and the main bathroom is on the ground floor. There are bedrooms on the first and second floors and the sitting room is on the third. The kitchen is on the fourth floor and there is a roof terrace above that. In total, there are a hundred steep and winding steps connecting all of these rooms:

From up on the roof you looked down onto the crowns of the surrounding trees:

The trees were alive with small birds searching for invertebrates:

The building is set in 800 acres of woodland and heathland, but is also very close to the M25/A3 intersection:

Anyone who has travelled south round the M25 recently will know that there have been major roadworks at its junction with the A3 over the past few months. In fact the A3 was completely closed over the weekend that we were staying because the Cockcrow Heathland Bridge was being lowered into place. This resulted in chaos on the other roads in the area – along with the dog being unable to manage the stairs, this was the second major challenge of the weekend.

The Cockcrow Bridge will be the UK’s first heathland bridge, connecting up the precious heath habitat that had been bisected by the A3:

We walked to the site of the bridge works to see how they were getting on:

As well as the new bridge, there was evidence that much heathland restoration work had already taken place:

It was all very interesting and we would love to return in a couple of years to see how it all looks once things have settled down.

Over the course of the weekend, we visited three National Trust properties, all of which were very generous with their dog policy. Polesden Lacey was bequeathed to the Trust by Mrs Greville in 1942.

The house itself was closed on the day of our visit but we would have loved to have seen the Edwardian interior. It was extensively remodelled by Mrs Greville in 1906 when she bought the house as her weekend retreat.

Hatchlands Park has been cared for by the National Trust since 1945. This house was also closed but we managed an invigorating walk in the extensive parkland and ate lunch in its cafe:

This twisted sweet chestnut in the grounds was planted in the 1740s:

Our third National Trust property, Claremont Landscape Gardens, was another interesting place:

After our walk, a little robin was very interested in the cake that we were eating at the cafe:

Meanwhile, back in the meadows, ghostly white barn owls are appearing on the cameras most nights:

Good to see that they are managing to catch some food:

A barn owl has even been seen in the vicinity of the new barn owl nest box:

The ringed female kestrel is still hunting in the meadows:

And the partially leucistic jay has reappeared after a few weeks absence:

A firecrest in the baking tray bath:

A badger in its characteristic tummy-scratching position:

And the weasel continues to pass to and fro along the gate:

January often feels like a long month and it was good to have visited somewhere new and interesting. I had actually always fancied staying in a tower, but now I feel that this itch has been well and truly scratched and I never need do it again. I know for sure that the dog agrees with me.

We have never been particularly good at sticking to New Year resolutions. However, this year we have decided to get ourselves off on a longish walk each week of 2025 to discover more of beautiful East Kent, whilst also getting fitter in the process.

The first of these walks last week took us past the ancient sweet chestnuts in Fredville Park near the village of Nonington. These trees were planted in the 1740s to create two tree-lined avenues leading from Fredville House out into its parkland.

The National Trust website states that one ancient oak hosts more biodiversity than a thousand 100-year-old oaks. As a tree ages, different types of decay, broken off branches and all manner of folds, burrs, loose bark and water pools create many different habitats for an increasing range of species.

Majesty, the largest surviving maiden oak tree in the United Kingdom and estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 years old, also stands in state at Fredville Park. However, the tree is on land with no public access and it requires special permission to go and see him. We did get this consent in 2018 and again in 2019 and have twice gone to pay our respects to his Majesty:

Delving into my photo archive for the 2019 photos of Majesty made me enthusiastic to gather together pictures of other elderly trees that we have come across in recent years:

We have our own impressive tree growing in the wood. It’s a sycamore coppice made up of a dozen connected trunks that have been left to grow enormous:

Jelly ears fungus is growing abundantly on any dead limbs:

And, above a height of about five metres, there is a healthy growth of lichen on the trunks:

We measured the girth at a height of 0.3m and found it to be 7.3m:

It is a really quite a tree and definitely one of the highlights of the wood.

I have been busy getting out the annual reviews of this blog and it has been a few weeks now since my last normal post. On the weekend before Christmas we had a cup of coffee at the shack at the end of Deal pier. It was just before midday and yet the mid-winter shadows were so long:

We hadn’t lingered over our coffee, yet it seemed like a completely different day by the time we returned back down the pier towards the town:

When the weather has allowed it, we have been getting on with winter jobs in the meadows such as hacking back bramble and planting trees. Nine new trees have been planted, some of which went to plug gaps in the new hedgerow:

One day I was out pruning this new hedge when two choughs flew past me, along the cliff-line southwards to Dover, where choughs were reintroduced in 2023. This was a very special sighting although sadly I didn’t get a photo.

Some of our other newly planted trees were fruit trees and went into the orchard. There is an insect hotel with a slate roof in the orchard and, whilst we were tree planting, we noticed something interesting happening on those slates:

The slates were covered with several hundred tiny cones, each only a couple of millimetres long. Once we had got our eyes in, we saw that the cones were slowly moving around:

This called for my macro lens. They turn out to be the caterpillars of the Luffia moth (Luffia lapidella form ferchaultella) that have protected themselves by building a cone of silk onto which fine grains of sand and soil were stuck:

The Luffia moth (Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella) is a common moth across the south of England but amazingly there are only females and all the young are produced parthogenically – they develop from an egg without it needing to be fertilised. As well as the crazy fact that there are no males involved, the adult females themselves are flightless and distribution is thought to be by wind

Interestingly, there is a different form of this moth in Cornwall (Luffia lapidella rather than the Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella across the rest of southern Britain) and this Cornish form does have winged males.

The weasel has been seen a few more times on the gate, although mostly moving and blurry:

To demonstrate just how small this animal is, I have cropped these two photos by the same amount to compare it with the size of a rat:

We had bought a small bale of dust-extracted barley straw to go into the hedgehog box that has recently gone out into the garden. We had no use for the rest of the bale so it went down by the wild pond in case the badgers were interested in using it as bedding in their nearby sett:

They definitely were interested:

But, because the straw was cut into short strands, it didn’t roll well and merely smeared itself into a straw road as the badgers dragged it off:

Looking over the fence, the straw road led down the cliff a short way and straight to a burrow. We couldn’t have planned this better if we had tried because we now have a good idea where baby badgers may be born in February and can get a camera on this sett entrance:

As usual at this time of year the trail cameras are not coming up with very much, but barn owls are still hunting in the meadows:

This next photo is amusing and I can tell you that I recognise those skinny black legs. Magpies often escort raptors around the meadows:

We have a new camera looking at the perch in the second meadow and it is doing a very good job coping with the miserable January low light and rain. It’s early days but so far I’m very impressed – it is twice as expensive as our normal cameras though:

It got very cold this week and the ponds froze over, although some areas around the reeds had melted by the end of the day. When I took out the peanuts at dusk, a little egret gracefully rose up from the pond just as I came alongside. Even though the bird was no doubt after our frogs and newts, it was forgiven because we have only ever once before seen an egret hunting in the ponds.

There is a camera looking along the banks of this pond, but unfortunately this did not have the egret on it. However, the camera looking at where the peanuts go down had been triggered by a hopeful fox twenty minutes before I arrived, and this does show the egret in the far right of the picture:

On Christmas Eve we completed the cutting and clearing of all the dogwood in the marjoram glade in the wood. Work in this large space is now completed and I am looking forward to the woodland butterflies we will see there in the summer:

We dug a pond in this marjoram clearing two years ago and this week the camera there captured a pair of sparrowhawks:

The wood is definitely well stocked with sparrowhawks but we’ve never seen two together before:

The ponds froze at the wood as well:

Fieldfares arrive at the woodland ponds at dusk throughout the winter to take a bath:

Woodcock are another winter visitor to visit the ponds:

Although they are not often seen bathing:

My final photo for today was taken on the second of our New Year resolution walks. This time we walked south along the cliffs towards St Margarets Bay and here we are returning home inland on a sunny early January day:

It’s going to be a bit of a challenge to plan a new and interesting walk for each week of the year and no doubt we shall have to start repeating ourselves eventually. But every walk, when done in a different season, should have something new to offer and it’s good to set ourselves a fresh and exciting target for 2025.

Part 1 of this review covered the birds in the meadows during 2024 and now I want to report on what everything else has been getting up to.

In 2023 four curved banks were built out of low-nutrient chalky soil that had been dug out for the foundations of our new garage. They were seeded with native annual and perennial plants and, by June this year, were looking pretty spectacular. Contemplating this photo now, imprisoned within the dark and cold of winter, they look impossibly cheering:

2. Mammals

As far as the foxes go, it was a year of two halves. At the start I was battling to cure a lovely and very tame vixen of her mange:

Since then, the foxes have been mange-free for the rest of the year and long may that last. There were no cubs this year though.

In April, Dave was working at the top of the second meadow. I was bringing out a cup of tea when I saw that he was being quietly observed from the hay pile:

Before long the fox noticed me looking at him looking at Dave and quietly loped off but the delightful interaction sticks in my memory:

Another encounter with our resident foxes happened during the annual cut of the meadows in September. Whenever he heard the sound of the tractor engine, a fox would magically materialise to see if there were any voles that had been uncovered:

It was a very good vole year and he found a lot:

The badgers have had a bit of a mixed year as well. Triplets were born in February and they first appeared above ground in April. As usual, the male was not permitted anywhere near them to begin with and the cubs only emerged under the close supervision of their mother:

As they grew, eventually the male was allowed into the group

But mortality in badger cubs is very high and only one in every three cubs survives to be a year old. So it is perhaps not surprising that one of this year’s cubs had unfortunately disappeared by June.

In July the mother badger demonstrated how to raid a buff-tailed bumblebee nest to the two remaining cubs. A nearby trail camera caught a muddy cub looking thoroughly invigorated by the whole thing:

The dug out nest the next morning:

And the cubs returned to the area to relive the excitement:

But by October I’m afraid to report that another cub had gone:

Now, as the new year begins, this cub is spending the winter cosily tucked up in the sett with its parents and I am reassured to see all three of them coming to the peanuts most nights.

I finish this year’s badgers’ story with a photo of one of the adults in the second meadow in June:

A stoat, seen in May, was a new mammal for the meadows:

A weasel appeared on this gate in November and has been seen there several times since:

I include this photo of a rat because we have never seen one preying on other rodents before:

I think that this enormous animal launching itself into the pond has to be a rat because of its tail, but I am surprised by the sheer size and colour of the animal:

I can’t look at this last photo in the mammal section without giggling. We do occasionally see neighbourhood cats on the cameras:

3. Amphibians and Reptiles

A few years ago just over a hundred slow worms were relocated to the meadows from a nearby small piece of land that was to be developed. Since that time an ecologist has visited several times a year to check on their wellbeing and advise on habitat management in the release area. But this autumn marked the satisfactory end of the project and the arriving slow worms are now judged to be happily integrated into meadow life.

There is a population of smooth newts in both ponds. Things kick off for them in March when the delightfully spotty males start shadowing the females, hoping to be the one to fertilise her eggs:

I have a polarising filter for the camera which improves things when taking photos into the water. Here a female has come to the surface for a gulp of air and is now sinking down and away from her air bubble:

At the beginning of April, the slow worm ecologist showed us how to spot newt eggs, laid onto pond weed with the tip of the leaf folded over for its protection

In June we were watching as an emperor dragonfly laid her eggs into the pond. We suddenly realised that there was a newt below her, presumably eating the eggs as they appeared. The emperor kept leaving and returning to this spot to lay, and the newt was always there waiting:

Some male frogs will hibernate on land but others will be buried in the mud at the bottom of the pond. These ones will then be first on the scene when they awake in February and gather together in the wild pond to wait for arriving females.

A few years ago frog numbers were decimated by a grey heron, but things are picking up again now:

You have to feel sorry for the females because this is what happens when one arrives at the pond:

They all bundle in, although eventually one male will win out and sit on top of the female to claim her as he waits for her to lay her eggs:

A male sticking his head out of a mass of already-developing spawn:

Reptiles and amphibians need to be careful because they can be regarded as a tasty snack. Here is a magpie with a newt and a kestrel with a lizard:

But, as the year comes to an end, they are all back safely hibernating. We found a pit of four lizards spending the winter together under a sampling square:

4. Invertebrates

Since coming to the meadows, I have become fascinated by the life cycles of the invertebrates that we have discovered here. The first photo in this section was taken at the beginning of February when lots of great pond snails (Lymnaea stagnalis) were floating upside down on the surface of the wild pond. I realised that I didn’t understand much about the anatomy of a water snail when I saw its mouth at the front but what was that siphon on the side taking in air?

We spotted another interesting snail in February, this time a small land snail. A two-toothed door snail (Clausilia bidentata) was attached to the bottom of a trail camera that was sitting on a rotting log:

In April I noticed that hairy-footed flower bees (Anthophora plumipes) were visiting the ‘shrimps on the barbie’ pulmonaria in a pot by the back door. I really like this plant and was pleased to see that this sweet-looking bee agreed with me;

This is another endearing animal that is on the wing in April. But the bee-flies don’t have such a lovable lifestyle since they are parasites of mining bees.

By May, green longhorn moths (Adela reaumurella) were dancing along the hedgerows. This male has antennae that are three times the length of his forewing:

These mating green shieldbugs (Palomena prasina) looked similar when viewed from above:

But from the side they were clearly different. The larger female is on the right:

From the side it was also possible to see their strange-looking mouthparts, adapted for sucking the sap out of plants, and the stink gland by their second pair of legs. An odorous liquid is produced from this, designed to deter predators:

The centipede Henia vesuviana was an exciting spot. It was several times longer than any other centipede I had previously seen, and moved its seventy-one pairs of legs in a very leisurely fashion:

Everything I read about this species said that it grows up to five centimetres, but ours was eight or nine:

St Mark’s flies are easily noticed once they emerge in May since they fly with their hind legs dangling. This mating pair was an ideal opportunity to see how different a male is from a female. The smaller male is on the right with his clear wings and large eyes:

In previous years we have photographed mating Empis tessellata, Britain’s largest dance flies. A male of these predatory flies will catch a St Mark’s fly and wait with it for a female to come along. Once she does, he offers her the prey as a ‘nuptial gift’ and mates with her as she eats it:

This year I was delighted to see the same thing happening again, but this time on a much smaller scale with a different species of Empis fly that is only about 3mm long:

Depressingly, Butterfly conservation’s 2024 Big Butterfly Count recorded the lowest number of butterflies in the programme’s 14-year history and we certainly noticed that there were generally far fewer than normal around. But here are some that we did see:

The hide pond was popular with dragonflies this summer. Here a male broad-bodied chaser awaits a female:

And a southern hawker lays eggs into the water:

I have a friend who is very interested in hoverflies and helped me improve my own hoverfly ID skills this year. I feel like I made a lot of progress but I’ve probably forgotten it all now:

Towards the end of summer we found two wasp spiders on their webs amongst the meadows grasses:

And Dave had a large privet hawkmoth caterpillar clinging to his clothing. This caterpillar will have been wandering the meadows to look for somewhere to pupate for the winter when it got picked up by Dave’s trousers:

Long bodied cellar spider spiders, Pholcus phalangioides, are not native and they can only survive here in our houses and sheds. I was interested to see a cellar spider feasting on a much larger spider in the conservatory:

I thought this was also quite a sight – a tawny cockroach, Ectobius pallidus, is a British native that lives outside and doesn’t need to shelter in our houses. This female is carrying around her egg sac that she will eventually lay in the soil:

On 7th September we set off round the meadows with the dog and immediately realised that something pretty spectacular had happened. Hundreds if not thousands of red admiral butterflies had flown across The Channel and arrived in the meadows and were now fluttering around the hedgerows and long grasses wherever we went. I took lots of photos but found it difficult to capture the scale of the irruption:

By the next day most of the butterflies had moved on and things returned to normal.

This completes my review of the meadows, and a beautiful sunset is my final curtain to draw across our 2024 wildlife year:

As the New Year begins I am excited to see what fresh delights it will bring.