It is now six years since we took on twelve acres of lovely mixed woodland on the edge of the Barham Downs near Canterbury. We still have a lot to learn but every year we take a few steps forward in our understanding and appreciation of the place, and here are my highlights for 2025:

Green Woodpeckers

Green woodpeckers once more nested in the old cherry tree, using the same low hole that they dug out last year.

Before long, however, there was this worrying photo of an adult flying from the nest carrying what appears to be a complete egg:

At the end of May there was another unwelcome photo, this time of an adult carrying a chick out of the nest:

However, even with the removal of the egg and the chick, two demanding youngsters remained:

Then, very early one morning at the end of June, one of the young woodpeckers fledged out of the hole, stretching its wings into the big wide world for the very first time:

The remaining chick stayed in the tree for a couple more days…

…before it too left the nest. Unfortunately the trail camera failed to capture the second fledging.

The spotty juveniles were then seen on trail cameras throughout the wood for the next few weeks bringing another green woodpecker breeding season to a satisfactory conclusion:

Dormice

2025 was the first full year for which I have held a licence from Natural England to disturb dormice. I certainly got a lot of practice because there were good numbers of dormice in the boxes and they seem to have had a good year, in our wood at least. The wood is part of the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme and, by the last tour of the year in November, twenty-five of the thirty boxes had dormice nests in them. Most of these were unoccupied by then but at some point during the year all those twenty-five boxes had had a dormouse living in them.

There are often other interesting things found in the dormice boxes. A wren nest was in box 28:

The lid of box 3 was stuck down with a dense silken mesh and inside was a labyrinth spider, Angelena labyrinthica. These very large spiders build big funnel webs to catch their prey in low vegetation. But when it is time for the female to produce her egg sac, she will create a labyrinth of impenetrable webbing to protect the eggs. Unfortunately she sometimes chooses to do this in a dormouse nest box.

Yellow-necked mice will also sometimes nest in the dormice boxes. This pair had a nest with young in box 25

Every year we also find pygmy shrews living on the top of abandoned dormice nests:

Dormice are thought to drink dew from leaf surfaces in the early hours of the morning and also get moisture from their food of fruits, berries, flowers and insects. It is most unusual for them both to come down to ground level and to use ponds to drink, but this summer a trail camera was often catching them at one of the woodland ponds:

The Pond in the Marjoram Clearing

Before our time at the wood, water was only occasionally available in small pools that formed in the centre of some of the coppice stools. We rapidly dug two ponds, but both are in the heavy shade of the trees and have remained rather dank and lifeless. They do provide somewhere for birds and mammals to drink and bathe, but we also wanted a pond where a healthy freshwater ecosystem could establish to support the tadpoles of woodland amphibians.

In January 2023 we dug a new pond out in the open of a clearing where the marjoram grows. It has proved a popular destination for larger birds, but I think the smaller birds do still prefer the other ponds that are less exposed:

The first sign that amphibians have now started using the pond was when we saw a heron extracting a frog from it in early February:

I worried that perhaps the heron had eaten the only frog but, towards the end of February, it was exciting to see that the wood’s first ever clump of frogspawn had been laid. A momentous moment indeed:

However, unfortunately I don’t think that the resulting tadpoles fared very well this year. For a start, the weather was often hot and dry and the water level got very low. But something else rather wonderful happened as well – a tadpole predator took up residence under the corrugated green square, placed by the side of the pond to increase its water catchment area. This was the first time that I had ever seen a snake on a trail camera:

This is an awful photo but this pair of mallards, stopping in at the pond in April, were a new species for the wood:

I am delighted by the way that this small, simple pond has improved the habitat and biodiversity of the wood. Over the winter we are going to add another green square on the other side of it to increase its water-catching ability and hopefully improve the chances for the tadpoles next year.

Other Birds in the Wood

A dry spell at the beginning of the year allowed birds’ muck to accumulate under the stand of silver birch at the centre of the wood – a clear sign that the wood is still being used as a winter crow roost:

We feel very privileged to have tawny owls living in the wood:

Back in 2022 a pair of tawny owls nested in one of our owl boxes and fledged two young:

The tawnies did again show interest in the box this spring..

…but once more lost out to the squirrels. When the squirrels had finished with the box, a pair of stock doves moved in and raised two broods over the summer:

There has been bird ringing in the wood this year. Marsh tits have declined by 81% in the UK between 1967 and 2023, so the breeding population in the wood is very precious:

We know they are breeding here because a brood was successfully raised in dormouse box 12 last year:

I think the peanut feeder in our wood must bring in great spotted woodpeckers from far and wide because John often seems to get them in his net:

And bullfinch is another species of bird that breeds in the wood every year:

Other Mammals in the wood

Plenty of mammals live in the wood other than the dormice. Our part of the wood doesn’t contain a major badger sett, but we do still see plenty of badgers:

We also have a population of foxes. Back in 2022 the dog alerted us to an old rabbit burrow that was being used by a family of foxes. I immediately got a trail camera on it:

We have not been so fortunate since then although foxes are still clearly raising their cubs there:

The UK rabbit population has seen a major decline in recent years for several reasons including rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus. It is difficult to assess the number of rabbits currently living in the wood but unfortunately there don’t seem to be very many:

The rabbits are prey for the woodland’s resident population of foxes and buzzards. Occasional mustelids have also been seen this year who love to eat rabbit when they can:

Our trail cameras caught a mustelid several times in the second half of the year. None of the photos however were good enough to be able to identify it categorically as a polecat, a feral ferret or a hybrid between the two. Our woodland neighbour, however, did much better:

Invertebrates and Plants in the wood

I had long wanted to be able to run a moth trap in the wood and finally took the plunge and bought a battery-powered moth trap this year. In the event I only ran it there once but this is something that is very much on the agenda for 2026.

The Kent county recorder for micro moths visited the wood in October to survey it for leaf mines. Because there are so many different species of tree, he managed to record fifty-seven different species of moth leaf mines, often more than one species on a single leaf. He also found other signs of moth activity of which we had previously been totally unaware, such as the larval case of a bagworm on the left below and the tiny orange wood balls excavated by a cherry tree tortrix moth larva on the right:

It was all completely fascinating stuff and we hope to take great strides forward on the subject of woodland moths next year.

We are much more familiar with the butterflies that are to be found in the wood. The large and fabulous silver-washed fritillaries feed on the flowers growing in the marjoram clearing in July and August:

They earn the ‘silver-washed’ in their common name because of the coloration on the underside of their wings:

White admirals are also sizeable, although this one looks like it has had some near misses:

Another plant that grows very well in our wood at the beginning of the season is the primrose.

In June we were in the wood with a friend who has a good macro camera. He photographed a bee that we think is a white-bellied mining bee, Andrena gravida. This is quite an exciting bee for the UK:

Tree bumblebees built a nest in one of the bird boxes this year:

In August I photographed a most peculiar-looking fly – the waisted bee-grabber, Physocephala rufipes, which is shown below:

This pellucid hoverfly, Volucella pellucens, seen in August and looking very much like Humpty Dumpty, is also a fly but its shape couldn’t be more different to the waisted bee-grabber:

There are always lots of bizarre-looking scorpion flies to be seen in the marjoram clearing in the summer:

We often find glow-worm larvae in the wood, such as this one seen in June:

Another thing on the agenda for 2026 is to visit the wood just after dark on a warm, still evening in June or July. This is in hope of seeing adult female glow-worms advertising their position to the males by glowing in the undergrowth.

My final photo is of one of the many white helleborines, a woodland specialist orchid, that appeared this May:

We would normally expect to find one or two white helleborines in the wood each spring, but this year was an extraordinary year for them and we found at least forty.

It was been another wonderful year of discovery in the wood. We are hoping to get some clearing and coppicing work done this winter and then will wait to see what 2026 brings. A very Happy New Year to you.