For the last few weeks I have been observing a family of swifts as they nested in a box attached to the side of the house. The pair of adults arrived back from Africa on 5th May and spent some time settling in and recovering before laying two eggs on 22nd and 24th May. These then hatched on 11th June, just as we were going in holiday. On our return, however, we found that there had been a major hiccup and there was only one adult left bringing up the young.

One chick did seem to be larger than the other, though, and on 20th July this one spent the day flapping its wings and readying itself to leave:

By the evening of the 20th the bigger chick had launched itself out into the big wide world, leaving its sibling alone in the box for the very first time. The parent returned from its foraging to spend that night with its remaining chick:

The parent went off again the next morning and the chick spent 21st July on its own, peering anxiously out of the hole:

Last year both chicks had fledged within a day of each other, so I was expecting the second chick to soon be on its way. But it resolutely stayed in the box.

I started to worry about it and was frequently checking the camera. My concern increased significantly when the parent failed to return to the box in the evening and the chick spent the second night after its sibling fledged alone:

Throughout the next day there was no further sign of the parent, however often I looked at the camera, and I spent the day agitated and with a feeling of helplessness. Therefore, it was with immense relief that I saw that the parent had eventually returned towards dusk and spent the third night after the fledging back in the box with its chick:

Still the young bird stayed in the box and the parent then spent the fourth night post-fledging with its remaining offspring.

Now we have reached the 24th July in the story, four days after the first chick fledged. At 6.30am the parent bird and its chick are staring out of the hole together and I imagine the young bird getting a pep talk to give it the confidence to launch itself into the rest of its life:

And then they were finally off! When I next checked the box half an hour later, they had both gone and it was empty:

As happened last year, the adult returned for one more night – which was last night – on its own in the box and I believe that our swift year has now come to an end.

All that remains to show that it ever happened is a beautifully tidy, feathery nest in the box and a pile of the chicks’ faecal sacks taken out of the box by the parent and then immediately dropped onto the flat roof below:

Perhaps the lengthy four day delay in the fledging of the second chick was because the good weather broke after the first chick left. We have had several episodes of thunderous rain over the last few days, turning the dog into a shaking, panting wreck hiding under the table.

Having had such a dry, hot first half of the summer I had been concerned about the water levels in the ponds but they are probably alright now – still low for sure, but no longer in danger of drying out:

The badgers must be pleased with all this rain, bringing the worms that should be 70% of their diet up to the surface of the soil:

But the bees definitely prefer the sunshine:

It does look like the fruit trees in the orchard liked all that heat as well, and both the apple and the pear trees are heavily laden. There is going to be a bumper harvest later this summer and I currently don’t have the freezer space for it:

One autumn a few years ago the foxes helped us out with this potential problem by climbing into the pear trees and eating the fruit themselves:

They also like rabbit and here is a fox this week launching itself at one:

As the summer draws to a close, the badgers will start making their quarters winter-ready by dragging multiple loads of dry vegetation backwards into their sett. But, for now, this badger decided that just one small mouthful was what it needed:

Never have I seen such fluffy crow. I presume that this must be one of the young ones:

And this one too – that tutu looks ridiculous:

A sparrowhawk starts to peck at its small bird prey as one of the magpies, the self-appointed policemen of the meadows, looks on:

Lovely to continue to see barn owls back once more in the meadows:

Two or three weeks ago we heard a turtle dove purring in a holm oak down by the wild pond and I put a couple of extra cameras out to see if it would come down to the water. Unfortunately we haven’t seen the turtle dove but one of the cameras has captured a much bigger bird instead:

I have had some time this week to skip out into the meadows with my macro camera and catch up with what the invertebrates are up to out there.

I was amazed by this thing, especially when I saw those big eyes and realised that it was a fly:

This is the conopid fly Conops quadrifasciatus ( the four-banded bee grabber) and I’m afraid to say that it has a bit of a gruesome but interesting lifecycle. This is a female fly and she will lay her eggs directly into the abdominal cavities of adult bumblebees, especially the red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius. The bees are usually intercepted in flight, with the conopid grabbing the bee with its long legs and wrestling with it while they fall to the ground. The odd shape of the end of the fly’s abdomen allows her to prise apart the abdominal segments of the bee allowing an egg to be inserted.

Once the egg hatches, the fly larva eats the bee from the inside, eventually killing it. But before the bee dies, the conopid larva within causes the bee to dig itself down into the soil. The fly then pupates underground where it is protected from the weather and predation. After overwintering, the adult conopid hatches from the pupa and digs its way up to the surface.

There are a lot of red-tailed bumblebees, the favoured host of this four-banded bee-grabber, in the meadows at the moment:

As well as the fascinating conopid fly, I also found two species of Cerceris digger wasps:

This tiny gall fly, Urophora quadrifasciata, is only 2-3mm long but has wonderfully marked wings:

There is a lot of dragonfly and damselfly action down at the ponds at the moment. Here is a male emperor, the UK’s largest dragonfly:

And here is a female emperor laying her eggs into the water:

I had another good haul of moths when I ran the trap this week, including some absolute beauties. The plumed fan-foot with his wonderful antennae on the left below was a new moth for me and I am very fond of the rosy footmen and magpie moths on the right.

I also haven’t seen a bee moth before:

It has been a wonderful year for six-spot burnet moths:

And there are a lot of butterflies around as well:

Butterfly Conservation’s The Big Butterfly Count is on at the moment and I am hoping that they will discover that it has been a good year for butterflies in general because they could definitely do with some better news.

We were hoping to find some families of dormice in July’s tour round the boxes in the wood. But, although we did find five solitary dormice and six additional empty dormouse nests in the fifty nest boxes, none of them had been used for breeding.

The marjoram in the large clearing in the wood is out in full flower now and is thronging with life. As we walked through it, a silver-washed fritillary glided across in front of us and stopped us in our tracks:

One beautiful summer evening we went for a late dog walk at Sandwich Bay. I was very charmed by a small family who crossed the road in front of us:

The mother pheasant goes across the road followed by her three small chicks:

I am not aware of pheasants being released into the countryside for shooting in our area and believe that these birds are part of a wild population. They were so very sweet as they anxiously tried to keep up with her:

I think these little chicks are sure to bring a smile to anyone’s face and to brighten up the worst of days.

Two extraordinary things happened on Thursday. Firstly, there was a photo of a juvenile cuckoo on one of the trail cameras:

However, this year’s cuckoo stayed around here for two or three days and has now been pictured on every perch that we have. Here are a few of the photos:

But the bird has now gone on its way, heading off over the Channel and further on south to Africa. By the time it returns next spring, it will be in its adult plumage which is distinctly less spotty and with a grey head, as seen in this photo from Wiki Commons:

The second surprising thing that happened on Thursday is that The King landed in the field next to the meadows to pay a visit to Walmer and Deal.

He visited Walmer Castle, the Walmer RNLI, helped with a beach clean and a few other things as well over the course of the day:

He then returned to his helicopter, which flew low directly over the meadows as it departed:

All in all, it was a very memorable day.

Other things that have been going on in the meadows this week:

A tawny owl has been successfully hunting:

And a barn owl has been seen again after quite a long absence:

Several pairs of stock doves have bred in the meadows this summer…

…and it looks like they are planning on fitting in another brood as well:

Somewhere in the hedgerows, some woodpigeon eggs have hatched. The parent will fly away with the broken egg so as not to advertise where the nest is:

I was so pleased to see the ringed kestrel back in the meadows because she hasn’t been spotted for ages and I was worrying about her:

Magpies, on the other hand, are always very much in evidence:

Once we get to high summer and winged ants take to the skies, black-headed gulls start ‘anting’ in the meadows:

The single-parent family of swifts in the nest box attached to the house continue to do well. This photo was taken at 5am but already the parent bird had gone off to catch food:

One of the swiftlets peering out of the box:

Our new thermal imaging camera shows a lovely orange glow at the end of one of the smaller swift boxes, as evidence that a second pair of swifts are still roosting in there to claim it as their own:

One of the foxes here has presumably broken his leg because he has been unable to put any weight on it for many months. He is the most enthusiastic partaker of the nightly peanuts and has taken to coming quite close to the house at dusk to wait for me:

Here he is around the meadows hopping along on three legs:

This is a different fox but I love the photo:

I am once again getting bitten by Campyloneura virgula, a tiny predatory mirid bug:

Campyloneura virgula mainly eats small invertebrates such as aphids and mites, using its piercing mouthparts to extract fluids from its prey. Whilst they are known to bite humans, the reason for this behaviour is still unknown.

A Kite-tailed robberfly, Machimus atricapillus, in the meadows:

This was a new day-flying moth to be spotted here, Sitochroa palealis:

It seems to be a very good year for another day-flyer, the six-spot burnet moth:

There also seem to be many more hoverflies around this year than normal:

The grass snake is still hanging around the new pond in the wood:

And the recently-fledged green woodpeckers love this shallow pool:

A pair of stock doves have nested in the tawny owl box this summer. This is lovely, but obviously not as good as if tawnies nested:

Last weekend we stayed in a large old farmhouse in Wiltshire with our children and their partners to attend the wedding of our nephew and his new wife:

A bush cricket was on our daughter’s windscreen as they set off from Crouch Hill in London to make their way to Wiltshire. Over the course of the journey down the M4 it slowly worked itself back along the car until it was on the rear windscreen by the time they arrived at the farmhouse two or three hours later. I’m afraid that it is now going to have to make a new home for itself in Wiltshire. I wonder how much wildlife is transported around the country in this way?

The view out over the Marlborough Downs from the front door of the farmhouse was simply breath-taking:

We returned from the wedding at 9.15pm on Saturday just as dusk was gathering. But we were stopped in our tracks at the sight of hundreds of swifts filling the sky above the house as they fitted in one last feed before it got dark. We lay on our backs on the lawn in our wedding finery to watch the spectacle. Never have I even come close to seeing such a large group of swifts and it was a completely unforgettable wildlife moment at the end of a long, hot day.

This week we visited an inspirational swift colony in Deal where an open day was being held to mark Swift Awareness Week. The first box went up on the semi-detached house in a residential street in time for the 2019 season and a pair of swifts arrived that very same year. In 2020 and 2021 three pairs of swifts nested and six young fledged both years. From then on things escalated very quickly – in 2022 there were thirteen pairs of birds producing fourteen chicks and in 2023 there were also thirteen pairs but sixteen chicks. Last year fourteen pairs of birds nested and seventeen baby swifts successfully fledged from the colony. Whilst we were standing there admiring all those boxes, the sky around the house was wonderfully alive with flights of screaming swifts.

We would like to establish our own swift colony here at home but ours is taking much, much longer to get going. Our first two boxes went up in 2019 just like the colony in Deal town, followed by another two the next year. We played loud swift calls around the boxes each summer which certainly did attract a lot of interest:

But it wasn’t until 2023 that a pair of swifts started roosting in the right hand side of the large box. We installed a camera into the box that winter whilst the birds were away in Africa, so we know that they returned to breed the next summer, successfully raising two chicks. They have arrived back again this year as well, laying two eggs that have now hatched. However, things are not quite going to plan in the box but more of that later.

We have recently had a new garage built with a tower that contains two swift boxes and these went into action in 2024. We are now playing swift calls from the tower rather from the boxes on the house, since the house boxes have already been discovered.

This week we took delivery of an exciting new piece of equipment – a thermal imaging monocular that speaks to a mobile phone.

Going forward, we hope to find many uses for this bit of kit, but we were able to put it to work immediately to see if there were birds in the wooden boxes. Here is the large swift box with the known nest shining brightly through the floor on the right-hand side:

However, I am now delighted to report that we have also been seeing a pair of swifts going in and out of the smaller box to the right:

We think that these are second year birds that have now chosen a mate and identified a nest site and will hopefully be back next year as three-year olds to breed.

One morning a group of three swifts were circling the house and repeatedly peering into the box that has the nest in, before flying off and then returning shortly afterwards for another look:

These are the famous swift ‘bangers’ – young, non-breeding birds checking to see if a box is suitable, occupied or empty, sometimes knocking a wing against the box to provoke a response.

I checked the camera to see if all these shenanigans were worrying the chicks inside the box, but they were serenely sitting on their nest, seemingly untroubled by the bangers outside:

There is, however, a problem. I have realised that there is now only a single parent raising these chicks. Last year both adult birds were back in the box by dark and spent every night in there together with their two chicks. This year I have not seen both adults together since coming back from holiday on 22nd June and there is only one parent in with the chicks overnight. I presume that one of the birds has perished.

It makes me feel quite emotional to think of the remaining parent battling on alone against the odds, putting its all into bringing up its young. But although it will be hard work and may take longer, research seems to suggest that it may still be possible to have a successful outcome. The chicks certainly seem to be doing well and have started to occasionally wander off from the nest:

During last weekend’s heatwave they were clearly hot in there:

I am unsure what all this means for our budding little swift colony next year. Will the remaining parent in the semi-detached box find itself another mate for 2026? And will the pair now roosting in the smaller box to the right get safely down to Africa and back to breed? We are planning on getting a camera into the box so that we can see them if they do. There will also be three further swift boxes going up on the north-facing wall over the winter so we hope that next year will be quite exciting.

One of our sons has an entomologist friend who has lent me some of her books:

One night this week I ran the moth trap and was slightly overwhelmed by how many moths I caught. I started going through them all including the micro moths, but quickly realised that I was going to have to just concentrate on the macro moths if I was ever to finish. As it was it took around five hours to identify and record them all. I logged 79 different species, such as three of these swallow-tailed moths, one herald and six Lozotaeniodes formosana, which is a beautiful micro moth that caught my eye:

The shining stars of the catch, though, were the three Sussex Emeralds:

The Sussex emerald is an extremely rare moth in the UK that breeds on wild carrot growing on shingle. Its main breeding site is Dungeness in Kent but it is also found in a couple of other small sites in Kent, one of which is directly below the meadows. Back in 2019 I accompanied the Butterfly Conservation ecologist down onto the shingle below the meadows on his annual count of Sussex Emerald caterpillars. He found several of them on wild carrot and I was very pleased to find one myself on some ragwort which they sometimes use as an alternative larval food plant:

Recent conservation work at Rye Harbour to increase the growth of wild carrot has resulted in the Sussex Emerald now being confirmed as breeding there. This new site is actually in Sussex, so the moth finally once more lives up to its name.

We watched a broad-bodied chaser dabbing her abdomen down into the water of the pond in the meadows to lay her eggs:

Since she is a female broad-bodied, she should by rights be green. However the females of this species sometimes take on some of the appearance of the blue male as they age:

Craneflies aren’t noted for their beauty but these tiger craneflies, Nephrotoma flavescens, are really rather nice:

It has been hot and the ponds in the wood have been popular. It’s good to see the spotty young green woodpeckers, recently fledged from the cherry tree nest, on the trail cameras:

Sometimes they are going around with a parent:

And sometimes it is just the two siblings together:

Jays are enthusiastic bathers throughout the year:

But we only see buzzards come down in weather like this:

And tawny owls as well:

Bullfinch nest in the wood every year and they are also great pond users, so I see them a lot. Their young have now fledged – here is one out with its parents:

And here are two bullfinch chicks on their own:

Not too long ago we dug this pond out in the open of the marjoram grove and put some green corrugated roofing material at its side to increase water run off into the pond and help keep it topped up.

Since a grass snake has been appearing on the trail camera at this pond recently, Dave looked under this green square out of curiosity and was a bit surprised to see a grass snake curled up under it. By the time I got there with my camera it had started to move off – but it was quite large:

This is the first time that I have managed to get a photo with my camera of a snake in the wood. What a treat.

Back in the meadows, a very odd-looking vessel sailed past this week. This is Canopée, a French sail-assisted freighter that launched in 2022 and was specifically designed to transport parts of the Ariane 6 rocket from European ports to the Guiana Space Centre in South America. She has a diesel engine and four wind-powered ‘Oceanwings’ which can cut the fuel consumption of the engine in half.

She looks amazing and is a bit of a pioneer in the quest to reduce the carbon footprint of shipping.

But I finish today with yesterday’s yoga class at Walmer Castle. What a wonderful way to start the weekend, exercising surrounded by bird song and with views down the cloud hedge borders to the Castle:

Once we are back to the short, dark days of winter, it will be difficult for me to believe that this ever happened.