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.