With the bird breeding season now largely over for another year, many warblers have started their migration south. John, one of the bird ringers, spent a morning in the meadows hoping to catch and ring a few of them as they moved through. He was pleased to get three species of warbler:

As normal, all these are young birds that have fledged this year. It is thought that the adult birds fly straight over to France without stopping and don’t end up in the bird ringers’ net.

John also sent me some photos he took while he was ringing in the wood recently. This is the wing of a juvenile great spotted woodpecker that was caught on 17th July. All the primary flight feathers are splayed out here and can be seen to be a bit tatty and less solidly black than the secondary feathers, which are bunched up and closer to the bird’s body. He can tell that all these primaries – comprising both the longer and the shorter feathers – are still juvenile feathers:

Because the bird was now ringed, he could tell that he had caught it again twelve days later on 29th July. Once more he has splayed out the primary flight feathers:

This time, although the longer primary feathers are still the juvenile feathers that the bird grew in the nest, the shorter of the primaries are now the smart, blacker adult feathers. So in just twelve days these feathers have been shed and seamlessly replaced. It is easy to think that bird ringing is only about putting a ring on a bird’s leg, but so much other important data about the birds age and status is being logged and reported as well.

The tail of the great spotted woodpecker is also interesting. The central shafts of the tail feathers are thick and sturdy giving the bird a really stiff tail. This is useful since it uses its tail as a third point of contact against the tree trunk, forming a stable tripod.

A photo of a green woodpecker in the meadows this week shows the young bird on a perch. That stiff tail is so adapted to pushing against the trunk of a tree that, when there is no trunk, it looks most uncomfortable:

The feathers of this tawny owl in the wood all look a bit of a mess in comparison to the woodpeckers:

Last weekend I attended a study day at Tyland Barn, the Kent Wildlife Trust headquarters near Maidstone. The class was on the identification, biology and ecology of bumblebees, led by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

The course was for intermediates but we ran through the Big Seven common bumblebees anyway. I was grateful for the recap because I’ve always found bumblebees difficult:

Cuckoo bees and the rarer bumblebees were also covered in some detail. It was all completely fascinating and I learned a lot – now I’ve just got to remember it and put it into practice.

It tends to be the long-tongued bee species that are struggling in the UK. These bees are constrained by needing flowers with long tubular shapes to be able to feed. When I got back from the study day, Dave and I had a think about how we could introduce more long-tongued bee-friendly plants both into the garden and native plant species into the meadows.

The ruderal bumblebee, Bombus ruderatus, is a rare bee with a long tongue that we saw in Walmer Castle grounds back in June. It was feeding on Stachys, or lamb’s tongue:

In fact the Stachys had all sorts of invertebrates using it and it seems to be a bit of a garden superstar. I subsequently planted three Stachys plants in the garden here, but I’m now wondering if this is enough.

We have a giant echium, Echium pininana, growing in the garden most years. This dramatic biennial puts up flower spikes that are over three metres tall, forming a skyscraper mass of small purple trumpet-shaped flowers. It flowers for months and is very popular with bees:

It’s a fantastic resource for all sorts of pollinators but I don’t think its trumpet flowers are deep enough for the rare long-tongued bumblebees:

Out in the meadows there is already a lot of knapweed and a large area of comfrey in the allotment – both of these plants have tubular flowers. But we think there could certainly be more honeysuckle scrambling over our hedgerows and we will plant some plugs this autumn.

The ringed female kestrel has returned to the meadows and we are seeing her every day:

She was ringed here as a young bird in September 2019 and is now six years old:

We feel so honoured that she is still here in the meadows all these years later.

So far this year I have only seen her eating insects. She has something like a bumblebee in her right claw here:

And I think this must be another great green bush-cricket in her left foot here:

There has also been another sighting of a male kestrel with his grey head:

The kestrels continue to be bothered by magpies who don’t want them hunting here:

And on the subject of magpies, this one appears to have two mice in its beak at the same time:

The fox with the broken leg comes up close to the house as dusk approaches and waits for me to emerge with the peanuts

He has to try to get in quickly because once the badgers arrive they tend to chase the foxes away:

Dave thinks they look like the Romans, who also used to feast lying down:

Now that I have my new battery-powered moth trap, I was really keen to run it in the wood to see if I could catch some woodland specialists:

However, I made a mistake in its placement. When we returned to the wood the next morning, the picnic table was already in dappled sunlight and the moths were far too warm and active. As soon as I started to look at them they flew away, which was very frustrating.

There was this handsome black arches moth remaining though, which is a moth that lives in woodland and I had never come across it before:

I will try again with the moth trap in the wood soon, this time placing it somewhere that will be in cool heavy shade the next morning.

Since the visit of the Kent micro moth recorder last week, I have been paying much more attention to the micros. I always used to largely ignore them on the basis that they were too numerous and mostly too difficult. When I ran the trap in the meadows this week, there was a large catch including many micro species which I worked through and tried to identify as best I could. I really wish I’d got a better photo of this one before letting it go because it’s a rare little thing:

My final photo for today is of ‘Her Ladyship’ – the wasp spider that has her web woven amongst the grasses of the meadows. She is a grasshopper specialist but we still haven’t seen her catch any of these. She is mostly doing a brisk business in flies but here she has something a bit different:

She has caught herself a dragonfly and you can see the packaged up wings in the big ball of web, with the body arching over the top. As always with spiders this is macabre but strangely fascinating all wrapped up into one.