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!