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.