We have been enjoying an extended spell of sunny, dry spring weather although, here on the cliffs overlooking the North Sea, this has often been accompanied by a strong and chilly north-easterly wind.

As part of the newly-formed volunteer wildlife monitoring team at Walmer Castle, we have been patrolling the Castle grounds once a week looking for signs of spring. This fox didn’t seem overly concerned about us:

The gardeners have managed to plant mistletoe onto the low fruit trees in the orchard, providing us with an opportunity to get a proper look at it. Mistletoe is a hemiparasite – although it can photosynthesise itself, it also takes water and nutrients from its host tree.

It is dioecious, having separate male and female plants. The flowers on the male plant on the left below produce pollen. The flowers of the female plant on the right will form into berries if they are pollinated by insects bringing that pollen across to them from a male plant.

A few berries still remain from last year:

The Castle’s moat has stone walls, providing ideal habitat for jumping spiders looking for prey to pounce on. We spotted two different species – I was already familiar with the zebra jumping spider, Salticus scenicus, because we get them in the meadows:

But the other jumping spider there was new to me. This spider was even smaller at only 2-3mm which presented a considerable photographic challenge:

We also saw a tawny mining bee in the Castle grounds. These bees will have spent the winter as pupae in their underground nests but now, in early April, they have triumphantly emerged as adults. The females are absolute stunners:

The meadows lie just to the south of the Castle and there are tawny mining bees here too. I do find bee identification difficult but think this next bee is a female yellow-legged mining bee, Andrena flavipes. She will have long yellow pollen-collecting hairs on the thighs of her hind legs, although these are covered in yellow pollen in this photo:

The next three photos are part of my ongoing project to get a half decent photo of a hairy-footed flower bee as she feeds from the pots of ‘shrimps on the barbie’ pulmonaria by the back door. The problem is that she is in constant motion, but I whacked the camera speed up to its highest setting to see what that would do.

A definite advance on last year’s efforts, but much room for improvement still.

As she approaches a flower she sticks out her mouthparts to probe into the flower:

Bee-flies, also sweet little things, like to visit the shrimps on the barbie flowers as well:

Dave took these mating dotted bee-flies on his camera phone. I had absolutely no idea that they went end-to-end like this. They can even fly around when they are joined up, with one of them having to fly backwards:

The first butterfly that hasn’t overwintered as an adult has appeared in the meadows. The speckled wood is the only British butterfly to hibernate both as a chrysalis and a caterpillar:

Other photos from the meadows this week:

At this time of year, I love to see the bee-flies feeding from the masses of primroses now flowering in the wood:

Sparrowhawks love this pond out in the open of the marjoram grove:

This next photo was taken in the very early morning when there was still dew on the camera lens, but I include it here anyway because it shows a pair of mallards that briefly stopped by. This is a new species for the wood:

A buzzard has once more been sitting by the tawny owl box that has nesting squirrels in it this year. Although buzzards mainly eat smaller mammals, they can and do eat squirrels as well:

Stock doves are hole nesters and a pair of these lovely birds have looked into the box to see if it was available for them. Unfortunately it wasn’t:

The hole in the old cherry tree hole continues to attract lot of interest. Nuthatch and great-spotted woodpecker here:

But it is the green woodpeckers that are now making the majority of visits to the tree:

You can just see a second green woodpecker on the other cherry tree as well:

Our wildlife monitoring tours of Walmer Castle grounds are usually rounded off with a cup of tea from the cafe. We like to sit up on the bastion, surrounded by cannons and with a view of the sea:

This week we were entertained by watching the lorries carrying shingle from the north end of the beach back down to the south again as part of the annual sea defence repairs:

This is a thankless task because it will soon be pushed back up again by a relentless sea. Beaches provide good defence against the sea because they take the damaging energy out of the waves – but the continual erosion of the beach around Kingsdown is leaving the houses there unprotected. This annual transportation of shingle to re-nourish Kingsdown beach to the south might seem bonkers but is currently considered to be the solution with the least harmful effect on the environment as well as being an economical one. Until a suitable alternative is found, it looks like we are destined to have these lorries driving up and down our beach every spring for the time being.