All six species of British native reptile can be found in Dorset and this week we spent three days searching for them. We were also looking for the six native amphibians that are in Dorset, as well as two established populations of non-native lizards – it was a very full few days.

This was another Naturetrek holiday and several expert herpetologists (amphibian and reptile experts) from the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust (ARC Trust) were our guides for the next few days.

We all met up at Mortons Manor in Corfe Castle at 3.30pm on Monday for an introduction, but in no time at all we were off to Creech Heath, one of the eighty reserves that the ARC Trust own or manage for ‘herps’ in Dorset and Surrey.

On this first reserve we found four smooth snakes, Coronella austriaca, sheltering under the tins. By the end of our time in Dorset, we had found over fifteen of them:

We also found a grass snake, Natrix helvetica, under one of the tins:

The third British snake species is the adder. These are sometimes found warming up under tins, but more often are to be found basking out in the open. Despite turning over so many tins in the numerous ARC Trust reserves we visited, as well as being taught where to look for them basking, we failed to see an adder during this holiday. We were assured, however, that they were definitely around but just keeping out of our way.

After dinner on the first day we went off on a trip to look for natterjack toads in the dark. However, we were scuppered by the weather – it had been so hot and dry that all the toads had buried themselves away in the soil.

We did, however, see natterjack tadpoles which was something:

The morning of the second day of the holiday was spent visiting a large ARC Trust reserve called Parley Common. It was here that we got our first glimpse of a sand lizard:

The sloughed skin of a smooth snake was found under one of the tins at Parley Common.

We found a smooth snake that was about to shed its skin. We knew this because its eyes were milky – the skin is shed from the entire length of the animal including its eyes which go milky as the skin slowly detaches itself before shedding:

There was a dead grass snake under one of the tins:

Although the snake was only very recently dead, a sexton beetle, Nicrophorus vespillo, had already arrived and will now start to bury the corpse and lay its eggs on it so that its larvae will have a safe food source.

I know that this is not a very good photo of a Dartford warbler but it’s the best I got and does show its amazing red eye:

Scarce chaser dragonflies were seen at Parley Common:

In the afternoon we drove to the seaside at Boscombe, a busy suburb of Bournemouth and really quite urban. We were there to see two non-native lizard populations: western green lizards, Lacerta bilineata, and wall lizards, Podarcis muralis.

We did see a western green lizard on the clifftop, but this is definitely not one of my better photos. As I was trying to switch my camera to manual focus to stop the camera focusing on the grass, the lizard moved off:

However, we did see these lizards in La Brenne in central France a few years ago. The male is on the left and the female on the right:

The female has lost her tail at some point and regrown a stubby new one made of cartilage. Apparently these lizards store quite a lot of fat reserves in their tails and this might well have been a big problem for her later in the year as she tried to put on sufficient fat to hibernate.

We saw lots of wall lizards as we descended the zigzag path down Portman Ravine onto the beach:

We stood for a while watching a male trying to interest a female by biting her:

It had been a very long day and we got back to Mortons Manor not much before 7pm. After dinner, we were back out again in the dark to try to see the three native species of newt: smooth, palmate and great crested.

We visited the Green Pool, part of another ARC Trust reserve. After an exceptionally dry spring, the water level was very low which made newt-hunting tricky.

They were not able to catch much from the banks of the pool so they waded in:

There were a lot of water scorpions in the water:

We did eventually find all three species of newt in this one pool. Here is a young great crested newt:

Last October we had a better view of a great crested newt when we rescued one that was stuck in a bucket in our daughter’s garden:

We had three amphibian experts with us at Green Pool but all three of them were completely flummoxed by this next newt:

We got back to the hotel at around 11.30pm. Naturetrek holidays are always pretty full-on but this one was on another level with the addition of the after-dinner trips out in the dark to spot amphibians.

On the last day of the holiday it was gently raining but we visited two more ARC Trust reserves. More smooth snakes were found at Great Ovens reserve as well as our first slow worm of the trip:

The great fox-spider, Alopecosa fabrilis, has recently been rediscovered at Great Ovens reserve. This is one of the UK’s largest and most endangered spider species that hadn’t been seen anywhere in the country for nearly twenty years and was feared extinct.

Rhododendron is absolutely beautiful at this time of year but is actually an invasive nightmare:

Gorse can also be a real problem as well because it just does too well in heathland habitats and is difficult to control. In our final reserve at Lytchett Bay, some of the gorse was covered in webbing made by the red gorse mite, Tetranychus lintearius. This tiny spider mite lives in colonies on the gorse protected by spun silk webs and it is hoped that they can eventually be used as a biological control:

We were delivered back to the hotel at 4pm, before starting our drive back to Kent. Over the course of our short herpetological holiday in Dorset we had learned so much from the lovely ARC Trust experts who are working hard to conserve and promote British reptiles and amphibians. In just three days our group had seen five of the six British native reptiles (we never did see an adder), and two additional bonus species of non-native reptiles. We had also seen five of the seven native species of amphibian, just missing the common frog and the pool frog that is not found in Dorset. We had also been introduced to several great ARC Trust reserves that we will certainly be returning to in the future to see if we can finally spot that elusive adder basking in the sunshine.

We have been staying at Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey, just off the north coast of Kent, twice a year for a while. One trip is in the winter to see the owls and the marsh harrier roost and the other in May when the baby animals are around. On each visit we see different things and come away full of joy at what a wild and wonderful place we have just an hour’s drive away from home.

We arrived there in the sunshine of this week to stay in the Saltbox, our favourite large and comfortable shepherd hut with far-reaching views out over the marsh:

May is a time of billowing cow parsley and fresh new leaves on the oaks:

Probably the most memorable thing about this visit was the three cuckoos that were flying between the trees on the raised land around the farmhouse. Two of them were males and spent much of the time perched and calling from a large willow just behind our hut.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get a better photo of them, but these silhouettes below show their long, pointy wings as they flew around in the gathering dusk:

We discovered a couple of interesting things about cuckoos that we hadn’t known before. The first thing is that they are often still calling as they fly, and the second and rather surprising thing is that they continued calling right through the night. This was close to where we were sleeping and, although it didn’t disturb me, it gave Dave a bad night and had indeed sent him a little bit cuckoo by the morning.

Cuckoos famously parasitise other birds by laying an egg in their nests. The cuckoo egg will then be the first to hatch and the young bird will push all the other eggs out of the nest. One of their favoured hosts is the reed warbler and we certainly heard a lot of these birds amongst the vegetation of the marsh.

Cuckoos also specialise in eating hairy caterpillars which are avoided by other birds because the hairs irritate their gut. We did see many hairy caterpillars on the reserve, such as lots of lackey moth caterpillars on the oaks, with their smoky-blue stripes and face, and vast numbers of brown-tail moth caterpillars on hawthorns down on the marsh. The female cuckoo should have plenty to eat as she waits for a reed warbler to leave its nest unattended for a moment so that she can sneak in unnoticed.

Another memorable sight this time was of a goldfinch sitting on her nest incubating her eggs:

However, I am sad to report that things all went horribly wrong for this nest. By the next morning it had been raided:

A third memorable thing was hearing two booming bitterns from different areas of the reserve. Sounding a bit like someone blowing across the top of a bottle, this is a loud and amazing sound to be emanating from out of the marsh.

The reserve is managed for breeding redshank and lapwing in particular although, if conditions are right for them, they are also right for much else. We certainly saw plenty of both of these two species but it seemed that we were too early for their chicks. Next year we should perhaps go later in May.

We were also too early for dragonflies, but surely not by much. This four-spotted chaser had just emerged as an adult and couldn’t yet fly:

Moorhen eggs, however, had already hatched. Some of the young were being kept around the shepherd huts to give them some protection from predators:

There are no badgers on Sheppey, and foxes, stoats and hedgehogs are controlled on the reserve. But one predator in particular would still be a problem for the chicks – the marsh harrier:

In May last year we saw a marsh harrier making off with a chick:

Marsh harriers are also very keen to catch leverets if they can. There are so many hares at Elmley and we got a good look at one of the adults enjoying the sunshine:

Not only do they have really long hind legs….

…their front legs are also surprisingly lengthy:

Like the moorhen chicks, some of the leverets are parked by their mothers amongst the shepherd huts, offering some sanctuary from the harriers. Back in May 2023 there was a particularly tame one:

Some other birds that we spotted this time at Elmley:

It is always lovely to see yellow wagtails at Elmley:

The female on the right below is so much paler than the male on the left, now in his breeding plumage

In winter everyone gets terribly excited about the owls at Elmley, me included. A lot of this is because of the thirty or so short-eared owls that roost in a field by the car park and are often easily viewable.

At the end of the winter, most of these short-eared owls leave, travelling north to Scandanavia, Russia and Iceland to breed. However, last year at least two pairs of short-eared owls stayed put and bred on the reserve, successfully fledging several young. This May there are once more short-eared owls remaining at Elmley and the hope is that they will again be breeding. We saw one of these owls out hunting as we went on a dusk tour with a nature guide:

Little owls are on the reserve all year. If you are on a nature tour, you are usually taken off the path to see the little owl nest box at the back of the old school house:

Little owls are nesting in this box and the next morning we saw one of the adults sunbathing amongst the ruins:

Barn owls are also resident at Elmley and there are apparently several pairs nesting there this year. Unfortunately we didn’t see a barn owl this time but I include a photo of one from a previous trip:

Long-eared owls also still remain on the reserve this spring, roosting in the day by the car park. However, they are very difficult to spot, especially when the trees have leaves. We did see one back in January though:

The best way to see them at this time of year is to wait for them to emerge at dusk. But, although we sat on a bench by the car park with the nature guide for a while, we weren’t lucky enough to spot one this time.

So once again we had a wonderful nature experience at Elmley. We were only there for 24 hours but saw so much.

We plan to return for a winter visit in January. Those noisy old cuckoos will be long gone by then and Dave will be hoping for a better night’s sleep.

We have returned from France to discover that inexperienced, young fox cubs were wandering round the meadows on their own and, before very long at all, there was an unfortunate incident with a fox cub in the dog’s mouth. Thankfully she doesn’t have many teeth these days and we were close by, so we quickly had the little cub on its way again, scampering back onto the cliff with no damage done. But it was all very stressful and we are now having to strictly control the dog to avoid this happening again.

The dog is now only allowed out on a lead until these cubs grow up a bit:

They are ridiculously sweet:

This cub is from the den at the top of the meadows.

Although this next photo gave me a bit of a shock:

There is a second fox den in the lower far corner, in the area that we call the amphitheatre. There are at least four cubs here and it is one of these that was recently found in the dog’s mouth:

A camera looking at the hole under fence is giving us some lovely views of these amphitheatre cubs:

I particularly like this photo of two of the cubs viewing some pigeons with interest:

There has been a lot of food being carried in. This looks like it is some sort of bird:

And this looks like a little chick:

The third den is on the cliff below the house and we are seeing these cubs in the back garden. They have a slightly different look to them:

One of the fox families relaxing by the pond in the early evening:

Back in 2022 it was another sort of cub that was causing us problems as we tried to keep it safe from the dog:

In June of that year the dog discovered one of the cubs fast asleep above ground in the shrubbery flanking the garden. We decided that this was such unusual behaviour that we called the RSPCA who took it off to a vet to be checked over. It was declared to be fine and released back into the meadows a couple of hours later:

But sadly things didn’t end well. There was a terrible drought here that summer and none of the three badger cubs survived.

This year there is a single cub and to date it has remained firmly underground during daylight hours, thank goodness. It’s an absolute fluff ball:

The mother is holding it down here so that she can clean it:

But the cub is really being rough-housed by its father here:

A lovely photo of last year’s cub, now nearly an adult:

And I think this is the mother badger emerging from the burrow by day:

My sister who lives in Berkshire often has lots of dogs visiting her. One of them must have discovered a mallard nest in long grass at the bottom of her garden and scared the female duck off the eggs:

The garden is in a rural location near the River Loddon and I am envious of their bats in the attic, red kites nesting in their trees and barn owls perching on the floodlights on the house. But a mallard nest was a first for them so they took advice and put a wire fence around the nest to protect it from the dogs. Initially the female duck did return and resume incubating the eggs, but unfortunately subsequently abandoned the nest despite their best efforts.

Whilst we were in France our pair of mallards continued their daily visits to the pond in the meadows just before dawn. They will have had a nest with eggs tucked away somewhere like the one in my sister’s garden. Before leaving the nest each morning to come to the pond, the female duck will have hidden her eggs with feathers plucked from her own breast to protect them from predators:

The two swifts are settling back into their box again after their long journey up from Africa:

So far they have added some strands of dried grass and a single feather to the black circle of last years nest:

But no egg has appeared as yet.

Now that it is May, more butterfly species are starting to emerge:

Two ‘blue’ butterfly species have been seen so far. The holly blue:

And the small blue:

We should also be seeing common blue and brown argus as well at some point.

I have an on-going project to attract more species of blue butterflies to the meadows and I am targeting my efforts on the adonis blue and the chalkhill blue, neither of which have ever been seen here. The larval food plant for both of these species is horseshoe vetch, plugs of which I planted onto the new chalk banks constructed during the building of our garage two years ago. This vetch is now doing really well and flowering profusely:

Over in the wood, I like this set of three photos taken by a trail camera looking at a hole in the ground:

A photo taken elsewhere in the wood shows a vixen that is clearly nursing young. There are no rights of way close to the wood and these cubs of hers should at least be safe from dogs:

Bullfinch always nest in the woods:

I have been seeing a firecrest at this pond throughout the winter and was really pleased to see it still visiting in May. Could it be nesting? Although our wood doesn’t have conifer trees, there are plenty in the wider wood:

I think there are squirrels nesting in this owl box although there has been very little recent action on the camera. A stock dove did visit to see if it could nest in there though:

In contrast there has been a lot of activity at the green woodpecker nest:

But I can offer no explanation for this next photo showing the male bird flying away from the nest with an egg. What is going on?:

This little robin was singing so loudly and so beautifully in the wood that I stopped and listened to it for ages. It even posed for a photo:

My last photo today is this one which made me smile:

Although we have visited France many times over the years, there is still so much of it to see. We have just returned from a week in Languedoc in south west France which is an interesting area of the country that I had never been to before. We were part of a guided Naturetrek holiday but, while the rest of the group flew into Carcassonne, we took two nights to drive down through France to join them.

After taking the ferry from Dover to Calais, we stayed near Troyes on the first night, visiting the Champagne house of Drappier to buy a few bottles of their delicious champagne the next morning. It was then a long drive south to the tiny wine village of Gigondas just into Provence for the second:

When we finally arrived in Languedoc on the third day, we saw that there must also be a great deal of wine produced there too. Every scrap of agricultural land in the region is covered in vines:

What is not suitable for vines is covered by the natural garrigue scrubland vegetation:

Our hotel for the week was in a little village near Narbonne, close to the foothills of the Pyrenees and the Spanish border.

There were fourteen of us in the group and two guides, Jason and Martin, and for the next week we travelled around the region in two minibuses.

The weather was calm and dry all week. However, France had had an unusually wet winter and early spring, resulting in many more mosquitos around than normal. This was a problem on the first day when we weren’t properly prepared for them and all got badly bitten. As a result we remained swathed in long sleeves and trousers for the rest of the week despite the heat, although few mosquitoes were subsequently encountered.

We saw around 120 species of bird over the course of the week, many of which Dave and I hadn’t seen before. I managed to get photos of some of them:

But it wasn’t all about the birds. We saw a lot of butterfly species too.

There were many orchid species to be seen at this time of year as well. Everyone got very excited by the rare large flowered bee orchid:

We didn’t see any snakes during the week but we did see several species of lizard, including these amazing Moorish geckos which looked like mini crocodiles:

The ends of their toes were flattened against the wall:

We also found these sweet little parsley frogs, and this one required moving to safety:

Many invertebrates were seen, photographed and identified over the course of the holiday but I include just two species of spider here because this post is already getting rather long:

We very much enjoyed our exploration of Languedoc, and the week spent with a group of interesting and like-minded people.

We drove back up through France, this time spending only one night halfway up the country in the fortified town of Langres. The Hotel de la Poste is apparently the oldest hotel in France and, although we have stayed there several times before, it has to be twenty-five years since we were last there. The hotel is the whole of this building and its eccentric roofline is very memorable:

We returned home to Kent and were delighted to find that our pair of swifts had arrived back before us:

I wonder if they were two of the 121,931 swifts that had flown past the migration watch at Leucate?