I’m starting this week with an extract from the appealing children’s poem ‘June was Made for Happiness’ written by Annette Wynne a century ago:

June was made for happy things, Boats and flowers, stars and wings, Not for wind and stress, June was made for happiness!

It certainly is a very lovely time of year with birds fledging all around. But one morning persistent, loud alarm calling by the back door alerted me to a potential problem and I found a fledgling blue tit that had taken a wrong turn and come into the house, ending up amongst the baskets in the lobby:

It was such a sweet little thing, still with the remnants of its yellow, fleshy gape at the sides of its beak:

It flew across to the window sill and I was easily able to gather it gently into my hands and return it to its anxious parents just outside.

Family groups of starlings are also now out and about, foraging over the meadows:

Two young crows were parked on one of the perches:

They waited there while food was brought in to them:

But sometimes it wasn’t very much such as the delicate spider arriving here:

We spotted this dragonfly that had just emerged from the hide pond and was preparing itself for its maiden flight. The exciting thing is that it is a four-spotted chaser – a common species but a new one for the meadows:

We have had some visitors this week and one of them, Martin, has allowed me to include some of the excellent invertebrate photos that he took in the meadows:

A common spotted orchid has reappeared down by the wild pond:

Every year we should have a smattering of pyramidal orchids as well, but this is the only one we’ve seen so far:

And later in the year loads of autumn ladies tresses, another type of orchid, will be appearing on our front lawn turning it into a no-go zone for a while.

Egg incubation is still ongoing in the swift box attached to the house:

The pair of birds are coming and going, quietly getting on with rearing their young. But we are also seeing other swifts tearing around the meadows. One morning a small gang of three of them were circling the wildlife tower on the garage. There are two swift boxes installed in there and we are playing loud swift calls from out of one of the nest holes in the hope that they will discover them:

Watching screaming parties of swifts over the meadows and around the house is definitely one of June’s happy things for us. These birds are not here for long and we try to make sure we really notice and appreciate them.

In June, when the nights are short, you often get the chance to see badgers out in the light:

On several evenings recently I have been surprised to see four adult badgers on the camera at the peanuts – we seem to have picked up another one:

The cub is still around but doesn’t yet come to the peanuts:

Although the badgers gather around the sett and at the peanuts, when they go off foraging they are mostly alone other than the cub which follows its mother to learn the ropes. Therefore this photo of four of them together, taken well away from the sett, was most unusual:

It is a bit difficult to judge the size of the animal in the photo below but, with that black tail tip, I think that it must be a stoat:

Over in the wood, one of the bird boxes has a nest of tree bumblebees in it. These bees have a ginger thorax and a black abdomen with a white tail:

The next two photos are of the bumblebee mimic hoverfly, Criorhina berberina, on the left and an actual bumblebee, the early bumblebee, Bombus pratorum, on the right. A bit like the ant mimic flies above, the hoverfly would like a predator to mistake it for a stinging bee and it is doing quite a good job of pretending to be one. But actually the eyes are so very different, as are the antennae. Both are Martin’s photos:

Poking around in the marjoram clearing in the wood, we found a burnished brass moth spending the day on a leaf, awaiting the arrival of the short June night when it would fly again. It wasn’t very well hidden so I hope it survived until then:

We also saw a soldier fly in the marjoram grove and this was the first time I’d seen one. There are forty-seven species of soldier fly in the UK and this one is the broad centurion, Chloromyia formosa, one of the most common:

This broad centurion had a strangely voluminous abdomen just visible under her wings, but nothing like the size of the abdomen of another soldier fly, the clubbed general, Stratiomys chamaeleon. Here is a photo of a clubbed general from Wiki Commons:

I would really like to see a clubbed general one day but they are extremely rare, although found at a few sites in Oxfordshire which is not a million miles away. There is a similar-looking soldier fly called the banded general, Stratiomys potamida. These banded general flies are more widely distributed so perhaps I should start with them.

The green woodpecker chicks have developed to the stage that they are shouting loudly out of the nest hole, demanding to be fed:

And there is certainly a lot of food being brought in to them:

It has been so very dry in East Kent this spring and the ponds in the wood are very low indeed:

The fox cubs are starting to get a bit bigger now that we have reached June:

These days I am part of the volunteer wildlife monitoring team at Walmer Castle and this week hoverfly expert Martin and I toured the Castle grounds to identify any that we saw. But, whilst we were looking for hoverflies, we spotted two species of interesting bees. Wool carder bees, Anthidium manicatum, were on the lamb’s ear plants. A very robust male bee here:

We also saw a very exciting and rare bee, the ruderal bumblebee, Bombus ruderatus. The male of these bees can come in this lovely all-black form:

But we did actually see nine species of hoverfly at Walmer Castle as well. This one was my favourite:

I finish today with our art installation-cum-wildlife habitat that our daughter-in-law built for us a couple of years ago in the meadows. We have already seen species of reptile, mammal and invertebrate that have made their home amongst the safety and warmth of these tiles and, with its billowing oxeye daisies, this definitely looks to me like one of those ‘June’s happy things’ that Annette Wynne wrote her poem about: