This week there was indisputable evidence that winter is on its way out as the annual frog spawning spectacle got underway. It’s the first big wildlife event of the year here and is always eagerly anticipated.

Male frogs, many of which will have spent the winter hibernating at the bottom of the pond, gather in shallow waters and wait for the arriving females, whose bellies will already be swollen with spawn.

At this special time of year, a smooth churring noise issues forth from the pond. A vocal sac in the frog’s throat inflates and deflates with air, amplifying the vibrations from its vocal cords and producing the sound.

This frog’s throat is deflated here:

And now it is puffed out:

This is all very restrained when compared with many other frog species. Photos on Wiki Commons of an Indian bullfrog (photo: Dr Raju Kasambe CCA 4.0) and Wayanad bush frog (Chinmayisk CCA 4.0) are examples of much more extreme croaking:

Our frogs may be less flamboyant than these but I never tire of attempting to get good shots of them as they gather together at this time of year. Once spawning is over, most of the adult frogs will leave the water and spend the rest of the year in the meadows eating insects, slugs, snails and worms.

There always seem to be many more males, but some females have been turning up:

As usual the spawn is laid in very shallow water, leading us to worry that there won’t be enough rain to keep everything wet until the tadpoles hatch. But this year we have a backup plan – there are now four sizeable rainwater tanks tucked behind our new garage and being fed from its large roof. Hosepipes can be run from these tanks down to the pond if necessary to raise their water level and stop the spawn from drying out. We also plan to use them in the height of summer if the ponds look like they might lose all their water completely.

The success of this year’s spawning is due in no small part to our two scarecrows, MacKenzie and Dude, who have been completely successful in keeping the herons away and the frogs safe:

If the pair of badgers here are going to have any cubs this year, they will have been born by now. A couple of years ago a new tunnel was dug that emerges directly out into the meadows. There has been some recent spring cleaning underground and old bedding has been dragged out from this entrance:

We also have a camera on another sett entrance on the cliff where we are seeing a female going in and out. The cliff is very steep here but there is a nice, safe terrace in front of the hole and we are hoping that this is where the cubs might first emerge in April:

We had to move a pile of wood to get access to cut a hedge this week. A beetle, Oedemera femoralis, was found hibernating in amongst the wood:

He also had amazing eyes:

Once he has woken from hibernation, this nationally scarce beetle will be nocturnal, feeding on the pollen and nectar of ivy and willow. It is only the males that have those big thighs – in fact he is the rather dowdy cousin of the swollen-thighed beetle, Oedemara nobilis, photographed below in the meadows in June 2019:

Hazel doesn’t do very well on the dry chalk soils of the meadows. However, the few hazel trees that we have here are now out in flower. The male catkins produce pollen to waft around freely in the breezes before the deciduous trees get their leaves. There are also three female flowers shown here sitting above the catkins, in a position where they are less likely to be self pollinated. If a grain of pollen lands on them, they will develop into hazel nuts in the autumn.

The strange-looking female flowers of the hazel in more detail:

But hazel grows very well indeed on the wetter soils at the wood. One minute it seems like we have the whole of the winter stretching ahead to do the hazel coppicing and clearing that we had planned. But, in the blink of an eye, time is fast running out and we are seized with a bad dose of last-minute-itis as spring approaches, when the birds will start nesting and the dormice awaken. We are currently busy opening up a small clearing near the marjoram glade:

It may not be large but the sun is now satisfyingly hitting the woodland floor and before long there should be some understorey growth. Our wood management is geared towards supporting dormice who will eat the blossom and berries of these understorey plants:

We are building dead hedges with some of the cut material which will provide protected highways and shelter for the dormice:

We have also set aside some lovely poles that we hope to use for den-building with one of our little grandsons sometime soon. We want to show him what fun there is to be had at the wood.

This colourful species of jelly fungus found in the wood is a Tremella species – probably Tremella mesenterica:

My last photo today is of a grey seal haul-out that my brother came across on a walk on the Roseland Penninsula in Cornwall last weekend.

What an amazing and uplifting sight.

A lot of people turned out for last Sunday’s Great Comp Snowdrop Fair. Great Comp garden, near Sevenoaks in Kent, is closed during the winter but it does open for just one day in mid February to hold its annual celebration of the snowdrop.

Frances Heron-Maxwell, a suffragette and a great supporter of women’s hockey and cricket, lived at Great Comp for fifty years in the first half of the 20th century. There was a cricket ground and hockey pitch in the grounds and women’s international matches were even played there. Then, in 1957, Eric and Joy Cameron bought the house and dedicated themselves to creating a beautiful garden, known for its rare plants. They set up a charitable trust to care for the house and grounds after their deaths so that we all now have the opportunity to enjoy it.

But no garden looks its best in February and I would like to return to Great Comp later in the year. In a few weeks the fifty types of magnolia that are grown there should be out in flower and that should be a wonderful sight.

It was inevitable that I would came away with a selection of new snowdrops to plant out in the garden. It would have been easy to go completely wild but I did manage some restraint and bought only five, in deference to how expensive these special varieties can be. I did see several for sale that were £75 for a single bulb.

By chatting to the stallholders I also picked up some useful tips on how to successfully grow snowdrops. One suggestion was that I should cover my most precious bulbs with horticultural fleece once they start to die back to stop the narcissus bulb fly (Merodon equestris) getting at them. The female hoverfly will lay her eggs onto the dying vegetation of daffodils, bluebells and snowdrops and the resulting larvae will then burrow down and live off the bulb, often killing it.

Much as I want to encourage hoverflies, this doesn’t extend to giving them complete freedom over my treasured snowdrop varieties. Let them instead run rampant over the hundreds of Spanish bluebells that flourish in the garden here, despite my efforts to pull them all up.

It is frog spawning season, but it has been too cold and windy for them to properly get going yet. We did see a pair looking like swamp monsters in the garden pond which has always struggled with duckweed

I record the date that we first see frogspawn each year and this has ranged from 10th February in 2020 to 8th March in 2018, so there is quite a big window.

The birds of prey have been out in the meadows:

All these birds of prey have a taste for short-tailed field voles, an animal that particularly likes overgrown fields with damp, tussocky grass. A large area of the second meadow that was not cut last autumn seems to be fulfilling this rough-grassland brief nicely:

As well as the grass tussocks there are lots of large ant nests. These are yellow meadow ants, Lasius flavus, that are only ever seen above ground when the winged ants disperse. For the rest of the time they are busy farming underground aphids – the aphids eat the grass roots and the ants eat the honeydew produced by the aphids. The nests can get very large in just one year if the meadow is not cut:

The kestrel is often to be found hovering over this tussocky area:

A visiting son took a video on his phone of a crow brandishing one of our rodents around. Here is a screenshot:

Crows are always very prominent in the meadows:

I am much fonder of them than I am of magpies:

But on the subject of magpies, the bird nesting season has got underway this week with one seen carrying a stick. They will ordinarily build a new nest each spring and I wonder where this year’s will be:

Spring is definitely on its way and a dunnock was singing so beautifully in the sunshine of this morning:

There is still a bitter easterly wind, though.

I finish today with a new project of ours which is to use the Ancient Tree Inventory to track down and visit the ancient trees of East Kent. Many are yew trees planted in churchyards and this week we ticked three of these off.

The ancient yews at Ringwould, Ripple and Thanington Without:

The yew at Ringwould on the left above is thought to be 1,300 years old. It is quite a sight to behold and I find it difficult to get my brain round how much change this tree has witnessed since it was planted in 700AD. Of course, it is also perfectly possible that this already-ancient tree might still be around in another thousand years but it is even more difficult to imagine what things might be like then..

Every February I get a little bit more besotted by snowdrops. There are a bewildering 2,500 varieties available in the UK and there is a stamp-collecting part of my brain that urges me on to plant as many as possible of these in the garden.

Last February I started a snowdrop bank, planting some normal and a few more unusual (and therefore expensive) varieties. I particularly like the ones with yellow ovaries which are unfortunately less vigorous, but ‘Madelaine’, shown above, has reappeared on the bank this year and seems to be doing rather well. However, I also planted three Spindlestone Surprise bulbs which have, so far, failed to come up at all.

This week we visited another garden that was open under the National Garden Scheme Snowdrop Festival. The garden was near Sutton Valance, a village south east of Maidstone, so we took the opportunity to visit Sutton Valance Castle whilst we were in the area:

Spring Platt is a garden on the North Downs with beautiful, far-reaching views out over the Kentish Weald:

The garden is surrounded by a large fruit farm growing Gala apples:

Four hundred and fifty varieties of snowdrop grow in the garden, and a lot of these are displayed in this snowdrop theatre:

We enjoyed scrutinising the pots and identifying the ones that we particularly liked. Lulu is certainly a very nice one:

Dave, with his interest in military history, wants to grow Lord Kitchener simply because he likes its name:

The owner of the garden recommended that I tried growing Belvedere Gold, which is apparently one of the easiest, yellow-ovaried varieties to grow:

One of the greenhouses in the garden is dedicated to successfully growing various different citrus trees. Dave was inspired by this, but I feel that we don’t have the necessary skill or dedication and it will all end in tears:

We always come away bursting with ideas when we visit a garden, but reality inevitably begins to bite when we return to our own highly-exposed piece of land perched on dry chalk cliffs.

Back in those very exposed meadows, I am surprised to notice what large feet weasels have:

A wet fox emerges up into the meadows from the cliff:

Badgers don’t seem to mind awful weather and positively relish the rain because this is when the worms come out, but unfortunately our male badger now seems to be blinded in his left eye:

The eye is open but is no longer reflecting light:

Badgers mainly rely on their extremely sensitive sense of smell and their eyesight is pretty poor anyway, so the loss of his eye shouldn’t cause him too many problems. He certainly seems happy enough:

Since this male is now so readily identifiable with only one eye, I have come to realise that there is occasionally a second male around, and he is so much beefier and pugnacious-looking. He actually lumbers from side to side as he walks:

The trail cameras have been affected by condensation recently, but birds of prey have been out and about in the meadows:

On sunny, still days over the winter, little collections of leaves have been floating on the water surface of the wild pond. If you stop and watch them properly, it becomes apparent that the groups of leaves are propelling themselves around:

Over in the wood, I did the annual maintenance tour around the dormouse boxes this week, removing any remaining nesting material, so that they are clean for when the animals reawaken in the spring. At the moment dormice will be hibernating down at ground level where the winter temperatures are more constant.

Every box had signs that birds have been using them for shelter over the cold winter nights:

Box 1 and box 29 both still had old nests in them, but they also had considerable quantities of fresh black droppings indicating that something was currently living on top of the nest:

I ignored this in box 1 and cleared the old nest out. But, in box 29, a pygmy shrew poked its little head up through the leaves just as I was debating with myself what to do. Pygmy shrews are very sensitive and can apparently easily die of fright, so I quickly closed the box back up and retreated. I now know what this mess is and, in future years, will leave such boxes undisturbed until the shrew has finished with it.

Box 12 had a brood of marsh tits in it last spring:

Whilst I was working on the dormouse boxes, Dave was putting up some new bird boxes. He put one up in the vicinity of box 12 in case marsh tits want to nest in the same area this year as well:

This micromoth was beautifully camouflaged on a silver birch trunk:

There is a stand of silver birch in the wood and I love to find evidence of the specialised birch-loving ecosystem that has developed around these trees. This week’s grey birch button moth is part of this, as are the birch polypore and fly agaric fungi that we often see there. More than 200 insects have been recorded in association with silver birch, including 130 species of moth – this means lots of caterpillars around to feed insectivorous birds. There are also two interesting shield bugs, the birch shield bug and the parent bug, and I hope be able to find these feeding on birch catkins in late summer.

I was not pleased to see a heron in the wood this week, catching itself a hibernating frog. I don’t think that there are many frogs in the wood but I had been hoping to get frog spawn nonetheless. This chance may now have gone:

Another long-running battle is who will win occupancy of the tawny nest box. Tawny owls did successfully nest there one year but I’m afraid to say that it usually the squirrels that are victorious. It seems to be going the same way again this year:

The tawny owls have been showing some interest but I am not at all hopeful:

Sparrowhawks have become very fond of taking a bath in this pond, but on occasions they are disappointed:

The overwintering woodcock are still in the wood. They will be leaving to return to Finland and Russia in mid March to early April:

A scarlet elf cup Sarcoscypha austriaca (or perhaps ruby elf cup Sarcoscypha coccinea because you need a microscope to distinguish these two) is a welcome pop of colour on an otherwise drab winter woodland floor:

There are signs that the wood is once again a popular crow roost this winter, but the birds don’t arrive until dusk and this is the only evidence we have of it:

My final photo for today is of a barn owl taken at Sandwich Bay, just up the coast from the meadows, where barn owls and short eared owls have been flying by day this winter and delighting photographers. I went on a group walk last week with the warden of the Sandwich Bay Observatory. We saw a lot and I learned all sorts of things, but unfortunately it was not great weather and we only had distant views of owls on this occasion:

But I hope to return there before the end of winter to have another go.

A link to last February’s post on snowdrops can be found here:

Galanthomania

King Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was unable to provide him with a male heir, so he very much wanted to divorce her. But first he needed to take the monumental step of breaking away from the Church of Rome that wouldn’t allow it.

This was a colossal upheaval with far-reaching consequences for the country. One of these was that Walmer Castle was built in 1539 – part of a coastal defence system to protect against the threat of an invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, wanting to re-establish the Pope’s authority in England.

The invasion never came, but the castle did eventually see action in the Second Civil War in 1648 when it was seized by Royalists and was only retaken by Parliamentary forces after several months of fighting.

In the 18th century the castle became the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. Various Prime Ministers were appointed Lord Warden, including the Duke of Wellington who spent a lot of time at the castle and then died there in 1852. By 1904, the War Office accepted that it had no further military use and passed the care of the castle to the Ministry of Works and then subsequently on to English Heritage.

We have a print of an 1822 painting of Walmer Castle by William Daniell as viewed from the south, with Walmer and Deal in the background. If that bonneted lady continued walking her dog just a little bit further towards the viewer, she could have been walking through what today is Walmermeadows:

The Queen Mother was Lord Warden from 1978 until her death in 2002. In 1997, English Heritage built the Queen Mother’s garden at the Castle in honour of her 95th birthday.

A corgi still remains in the garden today:

The current Lord Warden is Admiral Sir George Zambellas who has been newly appointed to the position in October 2024. A statue of him, made out of tiny pieces of slate, is now displayed in the Castle:

Walmer Castle is surrounded by thirty-two acres of formal gardens and parkland:

The Kitchen gardens are a bit of a highlight. At the moment they are looking rather bare:

I am rather envious of the mistletoe that they have successfully ‘planted’ onto branches of their apple trees:

But by April the kitchen gardens will no doubt be show-stopping:

There is a wonderful variety of venerable trees in the gardens:

I have been volunteering at Walmer Castle for the last two years as part of their wellbeing programme. This winter I have taken on an additional role as one of the newly-created volunteer wildlife monitoring team and I’m excited to see what will be discovered there once the grounds come alive in the spring.

But, for now, Dave and I are visiting to properly familiarise ourselves with the garden and to pinpoint potentially interesting areas. We are also photographing some of the birds spending the winter there.

So many of the mature trees have woodpecker holes in them and we are frequently seeing green and great-spotted woodpeckers:

Pleasing to get two green woodpeckers in one shot:

In the gazebo in the Queen Mother’s garden we spotted two of these green, thorny chrysalids high up near the ceiling:

My macro camera turned everything very orange for some reason, but does show the interestingly-shaped chrysalid in greater detail:

This is the overwintering stage of the large white butterfly. It’s a common butterfly but I hadn’t seen one of their chrysalids before. So long as it hasn’t been parasitised, the butterfly should hatch out in March or April.

Now, at the very beginning of February, the woodland gardens are starting to awaken with emerging spring bulbs:

It is a special and historic place and how wonderful to have it on our doorstep. But, although the garden is close to the meadows geographically, it is also a very different habitat in many ways and it will be really interesting to see how that impacts what we find there over the next few months. Another reason to be excited for spring.