This week we found ourselves strolling along Walmer seafront while the Walmer RNLI lifeboat crew were having their regular Sunday morning training session.

We got chatting to some of the volunteers at the station and discovered that the bigger boat, called the ‘Hounslow Branch’, is new and only arrived in March this year. It was funded by Lorna Newman who lived in Hounslow and left her entire estate to the RNLI, which was used to buy the £330,000 boat. Additionally, the specialist blue tractor cost about half a million pounds, the trailer about £130,000 and the small D class boat around £110,000. When you consider that there are 238 RNLI stations around the UK, it’s clear that this charity has really huge capital costs. Yet over 90% of their funding comes from donations with only 1% coming from Government sources.

In the autumn the meadows have their annual cut and the arisings are taken away. In this way the soil will slowly be losing its nutrients, which will favour flowering plants over the bullying grasses. Little by little the land is emerging as invertebrate-diverse flower meadows rather than grassy fields. This slow process is enhanced, in a small way, every September when we buy some native flower seed from Emorsgate Seeds.

We choose a particularly grassy section and spread their EM6F seed mix on it, consisting of various native perennial flowers suited for calcareous soils. This is to inject the grassland with flowering plants that will then spread their own seeds next year and thus continue on into the future.

As well as the EM6F mix, we always buy some other seeds to enjoy experimenting with. The ideal would be to have flowers constantly available during the summer that can feed both short and long-tongued invertebrates.

There are always a few bladder campion plants growing in the meadows every year but we would like to encourage more. The plant releases its fragrance, nectar and pollen in the evening to lure long-tongued moths to reach into the flower for the nectar and thereby pollinate it. Long-tongued bees will then mop up any remaining nectar during daylight hours. Kent is a hotspot for rare long-tongued bees such as the shrill carder bee and the ruderal bumblebee and it would be wonderful if we could support a population of these here.

Another plant with a very long flower tube is honeysuckle. There are a few honeysuckle plants scrambling through the hedgerows already, but I have now also planted a wall of native honeysuckle against the east face of a shed. This is a shade-loving plant that also releases its fragrance in the evening to attract long-tongued moths.

As I worked, I was being closely observed by a couple of robins and this little dunnock, all interested in any soil invertebrates that might have been exposed by the digging .

The beautiful ringed kestrel has been hunting in the meadows every day:

And as usual the magpies are doing what they can to drive her off:

She frequently takes a bath:

And this is what she looks like immediately afterwards:

If she can hunt from a perch rather than having to hover, she will use less energy and will therefore need to find less food to stay alive:

Here she is with a vole:

The buzzard is also still around:

And tawny owls are hunting at night:

One of the magpies has caught itself a green cricket:

I don’t know what prey this fox has in its mouth, but its quite big and looks like a mammal:

The foxes have now removed all the low hanging fruit from the pear tree:

If they are going to climb up into the tree to get the few remaining pears higher up, it will be in the next couple of nights.

The moth of the week this time is the olive tree pearl, Palpita vitrealis, which turned up in the trap. This is a moth of southern Europe where its larvae feed on olive trees and jasmine. It is a scarce but regular immigrant here but cannot survive our winters. The wings are beautifully translucent with a slight sheen

I did get lots of interesting moths in the trap this week. I start going through the trap just as it gets light – usually still in my pyjamas, I’m afraid. But this week I was kept company by a pair of large leopard slugs. One slug was in hot pursuit of the other as they travelled all over the place.

I presume that this was a prelude to mating.

The mating of leopard slugs is the stuff of legends and how I would love to see it one day. The courtship behaviour goes on for hours and then both slugs climb into a tree or other high area and lower themselves down, entwined together, on a thick string of mucus. Their blue, translucent mating organs then come out of their bodies and dangle below their bodies, connecting together while they exchange sperm. Both participants will later lay hundreds of eggs.

I am really kicking myself for not going out with a torch and camera that evening to try to see this behaviour.

One chilly morning we noticed that male ivy bees were roosting all over the place, on leaves and ivy heads, waiting for warmth from the sun before they got moving:

Over in the wood, an unusual mammal has paid a visit:

There was another infrequently-seen mammal in one of the dormouse boxes as well:

We found fourteen dormice in September’s tour round the thirty dormouse nest boxes in our wood. This included a family of a mother and four babies whose eyes had just recently opened:

In a post earlier this month I was wondering why the spots on a giraffe can be so variable between animals:

I am delighted to say that Joe, a reader of the blog, has been able to explain this to me. There are several species and sub-species of giraffe that are found in different areas of Africa, each having identifiably distinctive spots as shown by this diagram:

I will now never be able to see a giraffe again without trying to work out where it is from!

On 15th September 2015 I published my first ever blog post, hoping to document our journey of discovery as we started to manage six acres of coastal grassland for nature. Back then, I had no idea of how little I knew. Now, ten years and 586 posts later, it is probably true to say that I still know very little, even though it is considerably more than before.

We are in the middle of this year’s Heritage Open Days festival which runs from 12th to 21st September. Every year thousands of places across the country throw open their doors for free to celebrate our history and culture, the details of which can be found here: heritageopendays.org.uk. I had optimistically drawn up a list of interesting places that I wanted to go to last weekend but, as usual, things happened and we never got there. We did, however, manage a visit to the Norman church at nearby St Margarets-at-Cliffe. It is thought to have been built in 1136 and has remained largely unaltered since then.

I am hoping that we will get the opportunity to visit some more Heritage Open Day events around Deal this coming weekend.

On this 10th anniversary of the blog, I decided to start a ‘Moth of the Week’ spot and that the first moth featured was going be the lovely dusky thorn. There are nine different thorn moth species in the UK, all of which distinctively hold their wings up when at rest.

But no sooner had I chosen the dusky thorn as moth of the week, than he got toppled from his perch by Dave’s discovery of an absolute colossus of a moth – the convolvulus hawk-moth. In preparation for a visit by BT, he was hacking back the hedge around a telegraph pole that they will want to go up:

This clearing work exposed the moth that, up until then, had been resting ten feet up the pole, covered by the dense vegetation. The wingspan of this moth can be up to twelve centimetres which is bigger than any hawk-moth we had ever seen before:

They have enormously long tongues and are able to feed from flowers that no other British moth is able to access:

Their favoured flower to feed on is Nicotiana and many moth-lovers grow this tobacco plant in their gardens specifically to try to attract them. This is something I too will be attempting next year, although I read that these plants like full sun but moist soil, which will be a struggle on our free draining chalk.

Since we were responsible for it no longer being safely hidden, we rescued the moth and released it in the dark when the birds had roosted.

Some of the older hedgerows surrounding the meadows are now largely composed of ivy which, in September, has its moment of glory when it comes into flower. This represents a lifeline to invertebrates at a time when most other flowers in the meadows are flagging.

Red admiral butterflies on the ivy last September:

And common blue, box bug and common carder bee this week:

Unlike the others, the box bug is not after the pollen but uses the ivy as shelter.

Ivy bees, Colletes hederae, time their emergence into the world as adults to coincide with this September ivy flowering. They only collect ivy pollen, although they may visit other flowers for nectar.

There are countless thousands of ivy bees working the hedgerows here at the moment and, on a sunny calm day, the sound of their buzzing fills the air.

At night, it is moths rather than bees that are working the pollen. We went out with torches and found eight different species, including this old lady on the left and angle shades on the right:

There were many vine weevils on the ivy in the dark too:

These weevils are mating now and their grubs will develop over the winter. They are actually a bit of a nuisance here because our plant pots are places of safety for these grubs where their predators can’t reach them. They live off the roots of the plants and will eventually kill them, so we regularly treat the pots with the nematode Steinernema kraussei as a biological control. Experience over the years has also taught us that we just can’t grow their most favoured plants, such as Heuchera, in pots here because the weevils always get them in the end.

There were also earwigs on the ivy in the dark. I realised that I didn’t know much about earwigs and it turns out they are fascinating things. Most unusually among insects, earwigs show maternal care to their offspring. The female stays with her eggs in the soil and keeps them clean of fungal spores by licking them. Once the young hatch, she continues to remain with them and protects them until they can look after themselves.

But the most flabbergasting thing I found out is that they can fly! They do this only rarely but have two pairs of wings and the hind ones are intricately folded like complicated origami:

I find myself feeling more favourably towards earwigs now that I know a bit more about them.

One of the pear trees in the orchard is under close observation:

The foxes love pears and have previously gone to great lengths to get at the fruit. Or perhaps I should say that they have gone to great heights because they have climbed high up into the tree:

I would love to know if this was just a one-off or if they will do it again. This year the fruit is fast disappearing, but it hasn’t yet reached the point when all the lower pears have gone. It is surely only then that the foxes will ascend up into the tree if they are going to.

Jays, crows and magpies are busy pecking at the pears all over the tree…

…and badgers are hoovering up below:

The foxes, though, are reaching up onto their hind legs to pluck the pears off the tree:

I have many photos of this because it has been a good pear year:

This leap into the air made me laugh:

And here is a fox caught red-handed with a pear:

It is worth mentioning that windfall apples are lying on the ground untouched – it is only the pears that the foxes are after.

The female kestrel continues to regularly hunt in the meadows. She has caught something in her right talon here although I can’t work out what it is. She certainly does eat a lot of invertebrates but this is possibly a small reptile or amphibian:

And it is very unusual to see two kestrels together in the meadows:

So I have now entered the second decade of writing this blog. The astounding discovery that earwigs can fly and finding that supersized hawk-moth up a telegraph pole has been a great start. What will we find out to amaze and enthral us next?

We were back in Dorset last weekend for the wedding of our son Jonny. He was getting married at Smedmore House near Kimmeridge, in the heart of the World Heritage Jurassic Coast famed for its fossils.

Although I didn’t have much time for natural history investigation while I was there, this disused wasp nest was certainly very impressive:

On the day after the wedding, a group of us guests walked from the house down to Kimmeridge Bay. The owner of Smedmore House built the Clavell Tower on the estate in 1831 as a folly and observatory.

However, by 2006, the tower was in imminent danger of toppling into the sea as the cliff it stood on eroded. It was saved by the wonderful Landmark Trust who now own it:

In the Second World War, Kimmeridge Bay was a potential weak point in our coastal defences and reinforced concrete pill boxes were positioned here in 1940:

Another pillbox is sliding slowly down the beach. The anti-tank dragon’s teeth were to hinder access up the gully

Just as we arrived down at Kimmeridge Bay, the PS Waverley sailed by:

Before returning to Kent, we called in to the Etches Collection Museum in Kimmeridge village. Dave in the background gives some indication of the size of this enormous Pliosaur skull, the most complete that has been discovered to date:

This image of a different Pliosaur species, Pliosaurus funkei, gives some idea of what these animals looked like. (image by ДиБгд  CCA-SA 4.0 International)

We returned home to find that the badgers had been carrying out some major excavations themselves:

I have a camera pointing at this tunnel entrance and had hoped to see some action shots of this digging, but all I got was a straw-covered badger:

Autumn is a time when birds of prey gather in the meadows and we have had an exciting new arrival:

A buzzard has returned to the meadows to hunt:

The amount of white on a buzzard can vary greatly and, when I compare this buzzard to the one from last year, shown below, I wonder if it is in fact the same bird:

The ringed kestrel is also still here:

… and she continues to be bothered by the resident magpies:

Below is a magpie that has caught itself a large and juicy hawkmoth caterpillar:

Sparrowhawks are a constant presence in the meadows:

And a tawny owl was on the gate this week:

A weasel has been seen on this same gate:

John and John have been back ringing birds in the meadows and on one of their sessions they ringed seven species of warbler. Almost without exception the warblers are young birds, born this year. The theory is that the adults fly straight on across the sea without first stopping at the coast. John sent me some of his photos from the successful day:

Common whitethroat and reed warbler made up the seven warbler species they ringed that day.

Whilst they were in the meadows John and John spotted a sloe shieldbug (also called a hairy shieldbug, Dolycoris baccarum) which is a new species for the meadows:

One of the Johns is now off to visit his son and family in Western Australia, where the local beach has this interesting warning sign up:

There may not be any further bird ringing now until he returns in late October.

Birding is always thrilling in the autumn when the birds are on the move. But I have now discovered that there is also much excitement in the mothing world at this time, when immigrant moths can turn up in the trap.

The temperatures may now have dropped but, over in the wood, the tawny owls are still often bathing in the shallow ponds:

This next photo shows some highly unusual behaviour. This is a dormouse coming down for a drink at one of the woodland pools:

I finish this week with the giraffes at Wingham Wildlife Park near Canterbury where we went this week to celebrate our little granddaughter’s first birthday.

Now all of a sudden it seems to be mid-September and it is time to start cutting the meadows. But, depressingly, the weather forecast seems to suggest that there will be either rain or strong winds everyday for the next week or so and there may need to be a delay in the proceedings. This is frustrating but we shall have to see what happens.