We have returned from ten days away to find Spring bursting out all around. It was a lovely holiday but I was relieved not to have missed the big newt event of the year when male smooth newts display to the females and try to wow them. I attempt to photograph this every year with varying degrees of success.

Sitting by the pond with my camera one late morning, it was only the males that were loafing around in the open water. They are in their breeding finery at this time of year and are certainly looking pretty spectacular. Every so often newts need to come to the surface to take a gulp of air, which gave me a chance to get a clearer photo:

But it’s difficult to do them justice photographically when they are in the pond.

In 2020 we briefly fished two males out so that we could get a better look at them:

They are very impressive animals. There can be a big difference in coloration, though. These newts below are both adult male smooth newts:

In this sunny late morning by the pond, the females were lurking under cover and trying not to attract any attention to themselves:

But when I returned to the pond at around 4.30pm, things had changed and what Dave very aptly dubbed ‘the cocktail hour’ was underway. The females were now out in the open and the males were pursuing them. What they were trying to do was to get in front of a female and then bend in half to wag their tails at them. They wanted to catch her eye and be the one chosen to fertilise her eggs.

The badgers have also been preparing themselves for spring. There has been a lot of old bedding pulled out:

And many loads of fresh bedding have been dragged in:

The tunnel entrance on the steep cliff has been busy with badger comings and goings:

I was excited to see this photo because the female’s tummy looks like she is suckling young:

Then, finally, there was unequivocal evidence that there is indeed a cub this year. The camera that looks along the path at the top of the cliff took a video of a cub being carried from one burrow to another:

This cub will officially be allowed above ground in mid April and we will get a chance to have a proper look at it then.

Throughout last year a buzzard regularly hunted in the meadows. In fact, in the autumn, it was here most days:

But then, in mid November, I was driving home along the busy A258 towards Deal and was about a mile from the meadows when I saw that the cars coming towards me were all queued up behind a shiny black hearse that had come to a standstill in the road. As I got closer, I realised that the hearse had stopped because a buzzard had just been run over in front of it and it was waiting for an opportunity to go round the enormous dead bird rather than over it. I had a horrible gut feeling that this was our buzzard, and indeed it surely was because the bird has not been seen in the meadows since.

It is estimated that thousands of buzzards are killed or injured on the UK roads every year, but at least this is from a population of around 70,000 pairs of birds. The situation is so much worse for barn owls – the Barn Owl Trust estimates that there are 4,000 pairs of barn owls in Britain, producing 12,000 young each year. However, it is horrifying to hear that 3,000 to 5,000 of these young birds are then killed on our major roads. I found this page on the Trust’s website very interesting: https://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/hazards-solutions/barn-owls-major-roads/. They advocate planting screens of trees at the sides of major road black spots to force the owls to fly higher.

I was so sorry to lose our buzzard late last year but, on one sunny spring morning, I saw two buzzards soaring in circles over the meadows and ran for my camera:

They were being mobbed by our resident crows and they weren’t around for long, but they represented the hope that perhaps one day there might be a buzzard back on our perches once more.

There have been signs of spring all around. A male stock dove displays to his female:

Both song thrushes and blackbirds have been singing heartily, and collecting wet leaves for their nests from this tiny pond:

And crows have been flying around with sticks:

This fox is clearly feeding cubs:

And it’s so good to see butterflies fluttering around in the sunshine once more. We’ve just seen peacocks and brimstones so far – both of which overwinter as adults and so can react more quickly to the warmer weather:

The buff-tailed bumblebee queens that have survived the winter are now looking for nest sites to start their family and visiting spring flowers to keep their energy up:

This particular bee was carrying some hitch-hiking mites, harmless to the bee but hoping to be transported to her new nest where they will clear up detritus for her:

There are so many things to eagerly anticipate in spring. But I absolutely do not look forward to the alexanders once more raising their heads above the parapet:

The whole of the coastal area here in East Kent has a bit of a problem with abundant alexander growth at this time of the year. They are big, vigorous plants that just do too well at the expense of many other things. Pollinators love them but they can’t be trusted to stay under control. For several years now we have been operating a zero tolerance policy of any alexander that is brave enough to try to flower here. There are far too many plants to dig them all up in one go, and so our approach is dig those up that start to flower. In this way every year we are digging a proportion of them up whilst never getting any new ones because no seed is spread.

What a difference five years has made. These next two photos are taken from the same place in March 2020 and March 2025. We have recently let a stand of blackthorn grow up which is blocking the view to the gate, but it’s very gratifying to see such an improvement in the alexander situation:

A few other photos from the meadows this week:

Over in the wood, another vixen is feeding cubs:

We may have lost the buzzard from the meadows but we do still see them in the wood. A buzzard sat on this branch for a while, and the squirrels that are nesting in the tawny owl box were wise enough to keep a very low profile whilst it was around:

We have positioned a camera to once more monitor the hole in a cherry tree where green woodpeckers nested last year. So far there have been several prospective tenants: nuthatch, great tits, green woodpecker and great-spotted woodpecker…

…but so far no one has fully committed themselves.

And finally this week I will hand over to a couple of my meadow friends to bid you farewell:

We like to get away with the dog in early spring and this year we headed west. We first stayed for a few nights in Lion Lodge, the gatehouse for Newark Park which is a National Trust property in Gloucestershire, built on the Cotswold escarpment with views out over the Severn Valley.

The prime reason for our stay in Gloucestershire was to catch up with our daughter who lives in Cheltenham. However, whilst we were there, we also wanted to visit the Golden Triangle. This is an area between the villages of Newent, Dymock and Kempley on the Gloucestershire/Herefordshire border where our British native daffodil grows wild and free. There used to be a lot of orchards there but, in the 1960s and 70s, these were largely ripped out and the land used to grow grain and potatoes. The daffodils have become increasingly limited to roadside banks and hedgerows but a few protected remnants of the old days still exist. We visited two small Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust reserves, Vell Mill Meadow and Gwen and Vera’s Fields, where our native daffodil still grows in profusion.

The wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, is smaller than the planted garden varieties and has pale yellow petals surrounding a darker yellow trumpet. Although greatly declined, it can still be seen in woodland and damp meadows in parts of south Devon, the Black Mountains in Wales, the Lake District, and in the Golden Triangle along the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border.

After three nights at Lion Lodge we headed further west to Pond Cottage near Tavistock in Devon, just to the west of Dartmoor. Although Pond Cottage is now owned by The Landmark Trust, it sits within the estate of the Endsleigh Hotel.

The 6th Duke and Duchess of Bedford built what is today the hotel in the early 19th century as a ‘cottage’ for themselves and their twelve children for when they wanted a break from their main home at Woburn Abbey. At the time they owned about a third of Devon and had the luxury of selecting the loveliest of spots:

They commissioned the architect Jeffry Wyatville to build the house and several  other picturesque buildings within the estate such as Pond Cottage. The landscape gardener Sir Humphrey Repton designed the gardens, including a stream that tumbles over waterfalls and down through an arboretum, arriving into the pond at Pond Cottage before spilling out into the River Tamar.

The damp conditions around the stream meant that there were some fantastic lichens. I don’t know much about lichens but think that this magnificent specimen might be Peltigera horizontalis.

There were always grey wagtails poking around the stream and pond:

And lots of yellow spotted sedge, Philopotamus montanus – caddisflies that fluttered around the wet vegetation at this time of year:

Several imposing Sequoias rose high above the rest of the arboretum..

..and there were plenty of other wonderful trees as well:

When the Bedford family finally sold the estate in 1956 it was bought by a syndicate who formed the Endsleigh Fishing Club, still retaining the atmosphere of a privately-run house. However, things started to increasingly fall into disrepair and the Landmark Trust bought three of the buildings in the grounds during the 1970s and 80s in order to save them – Pond Cottage, the Dairy and Swiss Cottage. In 2005 the remainder of the estate, including 108 acres of grounds, was bought by Olga Polizzi and transformed into a very comfortable hotel. We stayed in the hotel back in 2013 and have lovely memories of that time.

Given that it was Dartmoor in March, we had a week of pretty amazing weather and were able to spend four days walking up on the moor.

There was a lot of ‘swaling’ going on the moor when we were there – the farmers are allowed to burn the heather, gorse and other moorland vegetation between 1st October and 31st March to encourage new growth for the sheep to graze. Since it was getting on towards the end of March, time was fast running out to get this job done:

When Dave and I first started visiting Dartmoor on a regular basis back in June 2013, we hired a wildlife guide because we really wanted to see the Ring Ouzels that were known to breed there. But, despite extensive searching on two separate days, we unfortunately failed to find a single one.

The number of pairs of breeding Ring Ouzel on Dartmoor had been in decline for some time but Tavy Cleave, a remote valley in the north-west militarised zone, became their last stronghold not just on Dartmoor but for the whole of Southern England. Sadly they are now almost certainly gone from Tavy Cleave as well. The reasons for the decline are unclear but climate change, grazing patterns and problems at their over-wintering sites and on migration are all potential factors and these aren’t problems that are going to be solved anytime soon.

We had never visited Tavy Cleave before but did a walk there this week.

Although Ring Ouzels do start to arrive back in the UK from mid March, we certainly didn’t see one on our walk up Tavy Cleave. If we want to see breeding Ring Ouzels now, we are going to have to take ourselves further north.

It was lovely to get away but, as always, I was itching to get home to see how spring was getting on back in Kent. But it certainly won’t be long before we return to Dartmoor once more – although we are most unlikely to ever get such good weather there again.

One night this week we had permission to visit the Queen Mother’s pond at Walmer Castle after dark to see if we could photograph the toads that are known to breed there.

Once it got completely dark, it was very pleasing to find about six pairs of common toads, Bufo bufo, as well as a further five toads on their own:

These Walmer Castle toads certainly looked a very different colour to the toad that has been overwintering under some corrugated iron in the wood for the last two years:

There were also a few single male frogs in the Queen Mother’s pond, but they were all on their own and we didn’t see any frog spawn:

And there were some newts as well. Since Walmer Castle is outside the known range of palmate newts, these are most probably smooth newts:

When the Queen Mother’s pond was built back in 1997, no provision was made for wildlife to exit the water. These days English Heritage has added a ramp for this purpose:

Elsewhere in the Castle grounds, there is a very different kind of pond – a shallow and ephemeral pool in a wet meadow.

On another dark night we visited this pool with torches to see if there were toads there too. There weren’t any toads but there was more frog spawn than I’d ever seen before:

This pond does often dry up completely in the summer so I hope that this year there is sufficient time for the tadpoles to develop before this happens. I sent the photos of the frog spawn to the Kent county recorder for reptiles and amphibians who reassured me that frogs have evolved to breed in shallow waterbodies that dry up during the summer, and they can change their developmental rate to emerge more quickly if need be. Toads can’t do this and so will always choose a deeper pond to breed in. Frogs are successful some years but fail in others – but when they are successful they are often very successful and so it balances out over time. 

It was really nice to see the Walmer Castle toads happily breeding so close to the meadows. We only very occasionally see toads here though. They are creatures of habit and, although they can cover distances of up to two kilometres, they will tend use the same migration routes back to the breeding pond in which they hatched every year.

Our most memorable encounter with toads was in the shadow of Stac Pollaidh in the northwest Highlands of Scotland at the end of April 2018:

What had caught our eyes there were lots of toad balls in the shallow waters of the loch as male toads all piled on top of arriving females:

It was quite a mesmerising sight.

The recent poor weather has meant that there haven’t been many interesting trail camera photos for several weeks, but finally there are a few this week. A badger emerging up by day into the meadows:

The sett entrance on the steep cliff has also been seeing a lot of badger activity:

But as well as the badgers, there are a lot of rat comings and goings from this burrow, and I think there must be a family of rats down there too. I’m not sure how that can work though:

The magpies are building this year’s nest and are carrying sticks around. Sometimes the stick is a large one:

..and sometimes it’s so tiny that it’s surely not worth bothering with:

For quite a while now, we have only been seeing one particular kestrel hunting in the meadows, and here she is again taking a bath:

Blackcaps have been around all winter. Using the data from bird ringing, it is now known that the blackcaps that breed here in the summer will then migrate south and spend the winter in North Africa. However, they are replaced by blackcaps that breed in Central Europe and fly across to the UK in the autumn to spend the winter with us:

The small weasel is still going to and fro across this gate:

I think that this jet black jelly fungus is the intriguingly-named Warlock’s butter, Exidia nigricans, growing on a large piece of whitebeam wood.

But, for my final photos, I return once more to amphibians. When we took on the wood in 2019 there was no water there at all, other than small natural pools that collect in the centre of some of the coppice stools. We have since dug three rough-and-ready ponds, the first two of which are in the shade amongst the trees. But the third one, only built two years ago, is out in the open of the marjoram glade:

I am really pleased to report that some frogspawn has now appeared in this new pond – probably the first frogspawn to be laid in our wood for many, many years.

I’m taking this as concrete evidence that our attempts to improve biodiversity in the wood are having a positive impact and that makes me very happy indeed.