There has been a recent spell of sunny, calm autumnal weather and Dave has been getting on with the annual cut of the meadows. He’s getting there now:

As usual about a third is being left to protect invertebrate populations overwintering amongst the grasses and flowers, as well as providing shelter for small mammals, birds and reptiles.

We call it a tractor but in truth it is not much more than a large ride-on mower with a good collection system, and it takes Dave many hours of driving around out there to get the job done. I do believe it’s a labour of love for him, although he seems reluctant to admit it.

In the area below we are conducting an experiment. This bit hadn’t been cut for the last two years and had developed some patches of bramble and rose which needed removing. But it also has large numbers of yellow meadow ant nests which are doing a good job of keeping the grasses at bay and which we would like to keep. So Dave plunged in with the tractor, weaving a sinuous path between woody growths but avoiding the anthills as best as he could:

Birds of prey are always interested once the cutting commences and the rodents and reptiles have fewer places to hide:

She has been very much in evidence this week:

A male kestrel, with his grey head and many fewer spots on his wing feathers, has been around almost as much as the female this week:

He too does lots of bathing:

I was pleased to see this photo of them together, providing evidence for what I had hoped – that they are a pair:

The buzzard is really quite an enormous bird:

And is particularly good at striking a dramatic pose:

It too likes a good bath:

We have been hearing tawny owls at night and they have also been on the cameras:

And a barn owl has returned too – always so very much leggier than the tawny:

Our neighbours have a walnut tree in their garden but say they never get any nuts from it. Seeing these photos below, I suspect I know why:

Presumably these corvids’ beaks are powerful enough to crack open a walnut which is pretty amazing.

We don’t get squirrels here, so birds making off with next door’s walnuts is no doubt why there is now a flourishing walnut tree slap bang in the middle of the second meadow:

It has been a long, hot summer and the wild pond has developed blanket weed for the first time ever:

I have donned my waders and gone in, on a mission to pull out any reeds encroaching into open water. I also tried scooping out the blanket weed and discovered it formed only the thinnest of surface layers which was good news. The pond is fed by water coming off the roofs of the house and garage, which is then carried 100m along an underground hosepipe. This has meant that we haven’t needed to add any tap water which, with all its nutrients and added chemicals, is not good for pond health.

There is much clearing work still to be done in this pond if we get time this autumn. But we can’t delay – come the winter, male frogs will be hibernating in the mud at the bottom and I worry that they would get squashed if we were to go in then.

All this year we have been part of a small team of wildlife volunteers at Walmer Castle who have been running weekly wildlife tours around the grounds. On our walk this week I saw a ladybird with no spots:

In the UK, native ladybird eggs are generally laid in spring. The larvae feed for a month or so and then pupate, with the new adults emerging in late summer. These new adults will then hibernate over the winter, breeding the following spring. The invasive harlequin ladybirds, however, have at least two generations each year.

But, when they first emerge from the pupa, adult ladybirds will have no black spots and these only slowly develop over a few hours or even days. Looking at the black and white markings at the front of the ladybird above, I think that this is a harlequin ladybird and that in a few days it will look like the harlequin below that we also saw during the walk:

I also found this orange ladybird, Halyzia sedecimguttata, in the moth trap this week:

An autumn crocus variety, Crocus speciosus, was flowering amongst the grasses in the castle meadows:

Another species of autumn crocus is the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, which has been cultivated and traded across Eurasia for over 3,500 years. It will apparently grow well in this country, and is available from many UK bulb suppliers, enabling you to grow and harvest your own saffron. I like the idea of doing that:

We are very late in the butterfly season now, and it is mainly wall butterflies that I am seeing. On cool mornings the males spend much time basking in sunny spots such as here on a reptile sampling square:

The pears have gone from the tree in the orchard and I have stopped the surveillance. The fruit higher up must have all been taken by birds because, as far as I could tell, the foxes did not climb the tree. The fun is now all over until next year:

I would have liked to have made this lovely feathered Ranunculus, Polymixis lichenea, my moth of the week:

However, it is this small micro moth below that has earned the prestigious moth of the week award because of all the drama it caused:

Despite ploughing through the thick micro moth field guide twice, I could not find it in there. To me it looked ever so much like the European grapevine moth, Lobesia botrana, which has only ever been recorded four times previously in Kent.

Native to Southern Italy, this moth is a major vineyard pest in the several countries that it has been accidentally introduced into. With the huge boom in Kent vineyards in recent years, I felt that finding this moth here had potentially serious ramifications.

I contacted the County Micro Moth Recorder who confirmed that it was going to need genital dissection to categorically establish its ID. He has recently visited the meadows and we also wanted to show him round the wood, so we met up with him there one day this week to pass across the moth for dissection.

Walking round the wood with him, we saw it from a completely fresh angle – that of the hundreds of moth species that have made the wood their home. We were shown lots of leaf mines made by the larval stage of micro moths – sometimes several species on a single leaf. He also found a bagworm larval case on some bark and some reddish eruptions on a cherry tree trunk that was evidence of a cherry tree tortrix moth larva at work.

The cherry tree tortrix adult is an absolute beauty:

It was all fascinating stuff and we are now really interested to find out more.

Once he had further investigated the queried moth later that day, the County Moth Recorder reported back that it was not in fact the very rare European grapevine moth, Lobesia botrana, but was the very similar wood marble, Lobesia reliquana. In the field guide, this wood marble moth is said to only fly in May and June but the book is out of date and there is now a second generation.

I can count seventeen siskin seen at this woodland pond this week:

Redwing spend the winter in the vicinity of the wood and the first of these seem to have already arrived:

Last weekend’s high-adrenaline Walmer lifeboat training took place on the sea just below the meadows, giving us ringside seats. The coastguard helicopter was lowering a winchman down towards the RNLI’s ‘Hounslow Branch’ larger boat:

It’s good to practice this in good conditions because one day they might find themselves doing it for real in a storm.

It was even calmer still on another day this week when the sea disguised itself as a placid mirror. Towards the end of every afternoon flights of gulls, that have been feeding inland, noisily fly over the meadows to roost in rafts on the sea. It is very atmospheric and a reminder to us that the day is drawing to a close and it’s almost time to go in.

It’s very rare indeed that the sea here looks this benign. I understand that we will have Storm Amy visiting us shortly and this view will soon be looking very different indeed.