Managing the hedgerows here is one of the most important things for us to get right. Tall hedgerows with wide bases provide food and shelter for all sorts of wildlife as well as being essential corridors linking habitats. Hedges support up to 80% of our woodland birds, 50% of our mammals and 30% of our butterflies as well as much other invertebrate life.

But in order to stay as a hedge rather than growing up into trees, the occasional cut is required. Hawthorn and Blackthorn only flower on old wood, so if only a third of the hedgerow is cut each year, it will then be just this third that will not flower and produce fruit the next season. Butterfly Conservation, however, argue that hedges should be cut less often than that, and only then in the late winter, to allow the many invertebrates that overwinter on the wood to complete their life cycles.

We use a nearby and reliably good agricultural contractor and this week a large green and yellow John Deere tractor arrived in the meadows to trim back our hedges:

Although we have a kilometre of hedge here, only half of it is actively managed. The other half has not been cut for decades and is now so overgrown and ivy-clad that it can no longer be cut with a flail head on a tractor. This is an unhealthy state for any hedge to be in and bits have already started falling over, but it is still producing a lot of fruit as well as offering all manner of safe places for invertebrates to overwinter.

Five years ago we planted an 85m stretch of mixed native hedgerow and it has already started to bear fruit. I am still annually pruning this with secateurs to encourage it bush out.

The remaining half a kilometre of hedgerow is cut with a flail head every other year:

The flail head rotates at 3,000 rpm and the cut vegetation is munched up into tiny bits and effectively disappears as mulch into the hedgerow rather than needing to be cleared up.

It is always a slightly shocking sight to see it in the meadows.

The heavy tractor makes quite a mess of the soft January ground:

The hedgerow took six hours to cut this week. Although we do need to give the contractors enough work to justify the trip over here, perhaps the job could be divided into two, or maybe even three, sections in the future to be done on successive years. In this way we would be achieving the rotation recommended as best practice to manage the hedgerows for wildlife.

Dave and I are part of the Walmer Castle volunteer wildlife team, monitoring and recording the wildlife there, as well as helping with the wildlife walks of the grounds that are put on for visitors to the Castle.

These days the Castle is open to the public as well as being the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. It is also a historic garden and the National Collection of Greatorex double snowdrops has its home there. Other snowdrop varieties are grown as well and some of these are already out in flower and being displayed in the kitchen garden for us to admire:

The snowdrops had even attracted a hoverfly in the weak January sunshine:

Last week we went down into one of the tunnels under the Castle to see what butterflies and moths might be hibernating there.

We didn’t find any hibernating butterflies down there but we did find three species of moth. Only a very small minority (2%) of British moths hibernate as adults and the herald is one of few that does. Its larval foodplants are willows and poplars and there aren’t many of those trees around here, so it was nice to see two heralds in the Walmer Castle tunnel this week:

There were also three twenty-plume moths. The caterpillars of these moths feed on the leaves and buds of honeysuckle:

In March 2023 I found one of these moths in the house. The light from the alarm box shining through its wings showed what an odd structure they are:

I also found six Bloxworth snouts down in the tunnels. Until recently this was only a very rare immigrant to mainland Britain, but has became established along the south coast and now seems to be spreading inland. The moth got its common name from being first discovered on an outhouse door at Bloxworth rectory in Dorset in 1884:

There are two generations each year, the first flying in July and August, and the second in September and October. It is this second brood that will overwinter as adults in tunnels where the temperature is more stable. The larvae feed mostly on pellitory-of-the-wall, Parietaria judaica, which is a plant that grows plentifully amongst the Castle’s stonework.

A graph from the Kent Moth Group website shows sightings of the Bloxworth snout in Kent over time:

We also saw the egg sac of a cave spider, Meta menardi, dangling on a 5cm silken thread from the roof:

This crow has been named Russell (ie Russell Crowe) by the English Heritage staff at the drawbridge where it regularly hangs out on the battlements:

The kestrels are also still being seen most days in the trees flanking the Castle drive:

A family of sparrowhawks were raised in the Castle grounds last summer and we think we have found the large nest:

Back home, this rather ramshackle bowl of bulbs is what is left of the forced hyacinths, especially prepared so that they flowered at Christmas. They are well past their best and have now gone outside to die back before being planted out into the garden in the autumn:

In accordance with instructions, I planted the bulbs into the bowl in early September and left them outside until the beginning of December, at which point they came into the warmth of the house. During this sojourn outside, though, a jay must have buried a walnut in there and this started to grow as soon as the bowl was brought inside.

It was a bumper year for our neighbours’ walnut tree and we saw both crows and magpies making the most of the bonanza:

We only saw jays with acorns, however:

But it is only the jays that will bury nuts away in the soil to feed themselves through the winter.

I extracted the fledgling walnut tree from the pot of hyacinths….

…and put it in its own deep pot to plant out once it has matured a bit more.

There has been a lot of tawny owl activity in the meadows of late. One night this one was on a perch…

…and this photo was taken shortly afterwards. What is going on?

The obvious explanation is that the bird was defecating – but surely that would have been a fast expulsion and so why isn’t it blurry? This remains a bit of a question mark for me.

It is fox mating season, when the males start shadowing the vixens to claim them for themselves and I am seeing pairs of foxes on cameras throughout the meadows. In the photo below, there is also a very brightly lit ship out to sea in the top right hand corner:

It is The Patricia, who anchored alongside us one night this week. Operated by Trinity House, she maintains the buoys and lightship that guard the notorious Goodwin Sands just offshore from the meadows. I have covered the Goodwin Sands in more detail in this previous post: https://walmermeadows.co.uk/2024/05/12/walking-on-the-goodwins/

We last saw her back in November working on the Mew Stone buoys in South Devon when we were on holiday there. Now happily on the other side of midwinter, it feels very right that we are both safely back in Kent.

I think that there’s a lot to like about January. The days are already noticeably getting longer and the brand new year, full of promise, is just beginning. Snowdrops are such elegant harbingers of spring and are now poking their heads up through the soil, guaranteed to lift one’s spirits on a dull winter’s day.

It is also the month when we pay our first visit of the year to Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. We were there with our son Jonty and daughter-in-law Ellie this week, staying for the first time in the two new cabins overlooking the marsh:

We have been regularly visiting this 3,300 acre marshland which was once farmed but is now a nature reserve of international importance. Large flocks of waders and wildfowl spend the winter there and the short-eared owls and marsh harrier roost are big attractions at this time of year.

Unfortunately a strong and bitter northerly wind got up soon after we arrived, but at least it was dry.

There is a table of interesting nature finds in the cow byre. Some teeny weeny nests here..

…and some grass snake skins:

There are about seven pairs of barn owls that are resident at Elmley and between them in 2024 they raised 40 owlets. However, 2025 was presumably a bad vole year and not a single barn owl chick successfully fledged on the reserve. Towards dusk we went on a guided nature tour where we saw some of Elmley’s barn owls:

A veritable herd of coots was grazing the grasses:

Several thousand lapwing are overwintering on the reserve and they have already started displaying. But courtship was definitely not on the mind of this lapwing below, as it stoically stood with its back to the wind:

A sweet little house sparrow:

It was an exceptional berry year in 2025 and the hawthorn trees on the reserve were still red with uneaten haws even now in the middle of January:

In the previous two winters, twenty to thirty short-eared owls have roosted on the ground in a scrubby area by the car park. Some of these were owls that had fledged in the Arctic where there is no darkness at all in the summer and the birds are therefore accustomed to being out in the daylight. They were delighting visitors by appearing during the afternoon.

This year, however, very few short-eared owls have arrived into the UK to spend the winter and it is thought that there are only a maximum of seven owls in the field by the car park. As well as that, they don’t seem to be Arctic-fledged birds and are generally not appearing until it is dark.

As we finished our dusk tour, it was very nearly dark and we did see two short-eared owls fly out over our heads and away.

Over the course of the day we had actually built up a reasonable tally of bird species, but the views of them weren’t terribly good in poor light and strong winds.

The next morning the weather had improved significantly and we even managed an al fresco breakfast whilst watching three marsh harriers scour the marshes.

Dave and I had to leave soon after breakfast but Jonty and Ellie stayed on and walked down to the hides. When they returned to the car park, the nature guide showed them a short-eared owl that was sitting on a grass tussock by the car park and a barn owl that was flying over, so they were very pleased with that.

Elmley doesn’t really have enough trees for tawny owls. The meadows don’t have many trees either but there has been a lot of tawny activity here this week, with owls on the perches most nights:

There has also been a most unwelcome visitor:

One afternoon we were very surprised to see an adult slow worm lying out in the open on the path:

Cold blooded slow worms need to hibernate over the winter because there is not enough heat to warm their blood. This animal was alive but extremely torpid and we suppose it had been plucked out from its hibernation by a corvid. It had also just lost the end of its tail which is probably how it escaped its predator’s clutches.

Our daughter Lizzie and her partner Sheff have just returned from two weeks in Japan.

This is a forest of mōsō bamboo, Phyllostachys edulis, in Arashiyama. This giant timber bamboo is native to China and Taiwan but is now widely found in Japan. It can reach heights of up to 28m and grows as much as 119 cm in twenty-four hours. Bamboo torture and execution was reportedly used in Japan in the Second World War where a bamboo shoot from a fast-growing species such as this grows through the body of a victim who was tied over it. Such claims lack reliable evidence however.

This information board was showing what fish were to be found in a lake that they visited:

I don’t know what any of these species are but there do seem to be rather a lot of them.

And finally for this brief foray into Japanese nature-related things, Lizzie became obsessed with Hokkaido milk whilst she was there. The Hokkaido climate and lush pastures are ideal for dairy farming and the area produces over 60% of the country’s milk, which is rich and creamy and with a slightly higher fat content than is normal:

She enjoyed it so much and is sad to discover that this milk is not available in the UK.

They seem to have had a marvellous time in Japan but now they are home and they too can start spotting things to be positive about in a British January.

This week we have had several days of gloriously sunny but icy weather. The sun shone out of blue skies but in this bleak midwinter the earth stood hard as iron and water was like a stone. Two or three days in and we realised that the animals were really thirsty:

We broke up the inch-thick ice on the ponds to expose some liquid water:

I walked down to this pond shortly afterwards and a flock of small birds rose from where they had been drinking at the broken ice. I felt so guilty that we hadn’t thought of doing this sooner but from then on we started regularly breaking up the ice on the ponds. A dish of water also went out at dusk with the peanuts for the foxes and badgers to drink.

Over the years we have noticed that snipe always arrive in the meadows in cold snaps such as these. We don’t know where they are normally spending the winter but we do know that they will inevitably turn up here once the temperature drops down low.

As expected, we started flushing snipe as we walked round with the dog this week and there were at least eight of them. The problem is that, not only are they are very well disguised, they are also very jittery. They fly up and off whilst we are still some distance away and we never get a proper look at them.

Determined to try to get a photo this year, I collected together five trail cameras from their duties elsewhere and trained them on an area that the snipe seemed to be repeatedly returning to:

Throwing trail cameras at the problem is the way that I have historically tackled such a challenge. One of them did indeed get a photo of the snipe:

Dave then came up with a much better solution. Using our new thermal imaging camera, he could pinpoint where the snipe had hunkered down whilst he remained a considerable distance away. He could then use his birding scope with a phone attached to take a photo from afar.

A small group of pheasants seem to be spending the entire winter with us this year and are appearing on trail cameras throughout the meadows. We think there are five of them including one male. It is actually surprising that this has never happened before:

We had a busy Christmas with some of the family here to help us celebrate. In preparation for the big day, our daughter-in-law Ellie brought some rosemary and sage in from the allotment to decorate a candlestick. She found some rosemary beetles on the rosemary.

When Ellie turned her attention to the sage, she found a couple of these odd-looking invertebrates:

I photographed them and scurried off to try to ID them.

Rather satisfyingly, they turned out to be the larvae of the rosemary beetles. I have found the adults on both rosemary and lavender before but didn’t know that they were also using the large sage bush in the allotment.

In the quiet days following Christmas we have spent several sessions working in the wood. All the dogwood has now been cut down and cleared from the marjoram glade and we can await its wonders in a few months time. We are now concentrating on extending another clearing that we started last year. We ran out of time last winter and hadn’t made the clearing large enough to properly get it out of the shade of the surrounding trees.

This large coppice is to the south of the new clearing and had to come down since it was casting long shadows across it. There is still a need for some final tidying up because the chainsaw ran out of battery, but it is now more or less happily dealt with:

Meanwhile the trail cameras in the wood have also been in action:

On one chilly morning we went to have a poke around Walmer Castle grounds to see what we could find:

One of our fellow volunteer wildlife team members had pointed us in the direction of an interesting fungus and I wanted to photograph it with my macro lens:

The scarlet caterpillar club fungus, Cordyceps militaris, takes over an underground butterfly or moth larvae or pupae and grows inside it, filling it with mycelium. Eventually a bright orange fruiting body emerges out of the head of the caterpillar or pupa and grows up to the surface of the soil.

Below is a Wiki Commons photo where the soil has been cut away to reveal the pupa:

This fungus has been used for centuries in Chinese medicine and is also eaten in soups and other dishes in the Far East

We were very charmed by a tame robin hanging around at Walmer castle:

This green crab spider, Diaea dorsata, was lurking in a male mistletoe flower:

Peering through the glass into the greenhouse, we could see a seven-spot ladybird that had chosen a very sensible, protected place on a cactus to see out the winter:

It was cold and there was very little about, but we did see a white wagtail up on the bastions of the castle:

And a pair of kestrels have often been spotted in the mature trees around the drawbridge of late, thrilling the English Heritage staff who stand there to welcome guests to the castle. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these birds found somewhere to nest in the castle walls?

I am delighted to be able to show you some fantastic bird photos taken from around the world by friends of our daughter-in-law who are also readers this blog. Joe and Sophie have recently moved to Vancouver in Canada and this photo of a male Anna’s hummingbird was taken there in April. These beautiful little birds are apparently to be seen on hummingbird feeders around Vancouver all year round and Joe and Sophie have even seen them from their flat. I am very envious:

And this is a juvenile Anna’s hummingbird seen on Vancouver Island in September:

Now that Dave and I no longer fly, we are never going to see a bald eagle in the wild like this one. This wonderfully atmospheric photo was taken at the George C Reifel reserve in Vancouver:

The pink robin is native to Southeastern Australia and they saw this male in Tasmania in March:

They were also in Borneo in March to climb Malaysia’s highest mountain, Mount Kinabalu, when they saw this indigo flycatcher with a fly in its beak:

But before they even left for Canada, they took this photo of a short-eared owl when visiting Elmley Nature Reserve here in Kent:

She was a bit of a battle axe in many ways, but I have fond nostalgic memories of my paternal grandmother making marmalade in her kitchen in Maidenhead when I was a child. She was of a generation that had lived through both World Wars and everything was cooked from scratch and was generally simple but delicious. Although I have to say that I was not a fan of the cow intestines from the butcher that she would boil up as dinner for the dogs, filling the house with the most revolting smell.

With Granny Hart very much in mind, we set about making our own marmalade this week.

Simmering away on the hob for many hours, this made the house smell deliciously citrusy and is definitely now set to become a January tradition.

This is the concluding part of the review, covering the highlights from last year for both the mammals and the invertebrates of the meadows.

Mammals

I start with a photo that I like of a fox looking really alert and wild:

This is another favourite 2025 photo of mine, an action shot of a fox and a rabbit. The fox’s tail looks so very long:

In May, we were away with the dog for a while and the meadows lay undisturbed. This fact did not go unnoticed by the foxes, who took the opportunity to park their cubs here while they went off to find them food. There was a single cub at the top of the second meadow:

This is its mother, with obvious signs that she is feeding young:

The cub has been given a headless rabbit by a parent here:

A bit further down the slope there was a second family:

These four cubs spent a lot of time chilling out while they waited for their parents to bring them food:

They were very adorable:

There was a third family of cubs on the cliff in front of the house as well. We returned to find innocent and inexperienced fox cubs wandering around everywhere:

This was a real headache because of the dog. Although she is not really a hunter, she was unable to resist such easy targets. We started putting her on a lead whenever she went out but, within two days of our return, all of the cubs had anyway been removed from the meadows by their parents. I suppose they judged that this was no longer a safe place for them to be. It was quite sobering to have such categorical evidence of the negative impact we can sometimes have on the wildlife here.

A fox with one or several rodents in its mouth:

A few years ago, foxes were climbing up into this pear tree below to get at the pears. This autumn they stayed on the ground, but they still removed most of the low-hanging fruit. Foxes really love pears:

This lovely fox that we call Tripod was not able to put any weight on his right front leg all year. It must have badly affected his ability to hunt prey and, consequently, he was an enthusiastic partaker of the nightly peanuts, often coming up close to the house towards dusk to hurry me along:

I had hoped that his leg would eventually get better but that doesn’t seemed to have happened. Despite everything, though, he seems to be doing alright and he ends the fox section of this review.

There is a badger sett dug into the steep cliff just below the meadows and we have been closely following the fortunes of its badgers for the last decade.

Badgers are masters of relaxation:

Although it is very normal to see the badgers together at the peanuts, I have never seen them out foraging as a pack before:

They are such great housekeepers. Old bedding is dragged out of the sett, as on the left below, and fresh clean hay is brought in to replace it, as on the right:

At the beginning of April, a single cub appeared above ground:

As normal, the adult male was not allowed near the cub for a while. Even once he was, he seemed to be alarmingly rough with the little thing:

The mortality rate in badger cubs is shockingly high with about 60% not surviving their first year. Most of these starve once their mother stops suckling them. This is particularly the case in dry summers when earthworms, which would normally make up 80% of their diet, are difficult to reach because the ground is hard and the worms have gone down deep. In the drought summer of 2022 all four of the badger cubs here died. In 2025, however, it was better news and the single cub survived the summer.

There were two other mammal species of note last year. A weasel was going backwards and forwards across this gate throughout the year:

And there were two separate sightings of a stoat. On both occasions it was seen at the top of the second meadow close to where we see the rabbits:

Invertebrates

There is something about photographs of butterflies on beautiful flowers that is so elevating to the spirits in the depths of winter and I will get the invertebrate section started with some of these.

The sunny and hot weather last year had a very positive impact on the butterflies here. A wall butterfly on hawthorn:

After several years of worrying about them, green hairstreaks finally had a good year:

There was enough kidney vetch around to keep the small blues happy:

Small blue egg-laying into a kidney vetch flower:

Small coppers are very susceptible to variation and in fact there are 140 named aberrations that occur in the UK. This small copper, with those additional metallic blue spots in front of the orange bars on its hind wings is showing the most common aberration called caeruleopunctata:

Marbled whites and all three skipper species that we see here also had good years:

Soon after we moved to the meadows we planted some alder buckthorn saplings and, although they are not trees of chalk downland, they seem to be doing alright. We wanted them here because they are the larval foodplant of the brimstone butterfly and every year we are delighted to see brimstone caterpillars on the leaves:

I have an ongoing project to try to encourage adonis and chalkhill blues to the meadows. Both of these butterflies use horseshoe vetch as their sole larval foodplant and I now have a lot of this plant growing well in the meadows:

We also have the other flowering plants such as knapweed and scabious that the adults like to nectar up on. Both of these butterflies have a symbiotic relationship with ants and I presume that we have the right ant species. Now all that is needed is for the butterflies themselves to discover this fantastic habitat that I have been busily creating for them. This hasn’t happened yet but I remain ever optimistic.

My enthusiasm for moths was reignited in a big way last year. Peach blossom, below, was just one of the 178 species of macro-moths that I recorded in the meadows and what a beautiful moth it is:

It’s always exciting to have a Sussex emerald in the trap because they are rare and localised, favouring wild carrot growing on shingle beaches as their larval foodplant. One morning I had four of them in my trap:

In July the Kent county micro-moth recorder came to the meadows and went through my moth trap with me. This gave me the confidence to start trying to identify micro-moths as well as the macros, instead of just ignoring them on the basis that they are too difficult and I didn’t have the time. This turned out to be very rewarding and I ended the year with 70 species of micro-moth on my list. There are around 2,000 micro-moth species in the UK, though, and I am hoping my tally will increase greatly in 2026.

It is endlessly fascinating to spend time researching the lifecycles of the moths in the trap and the plants that they rely on. The larvae of the rare Bugloss ermine, for example, feed on vipers bugloss, a plant that likes to grow on shingle beaches and consequently loves it around here:

In August I bought a battery-powered moth trap which I can now use to catch moths in the second meadow:

The meadows, looking out towards France as they do, are well placed to record immigrant moths coming across from Continental Europe, such as this four-spotted footman in the trap in September:

There are often other things found in the trap as well as moths. This strange-looking creature with its antennae coming out halfway along its snout is either an acorn weevil (Curculio glandium) or a nut weevil (Curculio nucum). To tell the difference I’d have needed to get a much better look at the end of its antennae:

Not all moths fly at night and there are some beautiful moths to be seen out in the sunshine with the butterflies:

I did see a new day-flying moth in July last year. The carrot-seed moth, Sitochroa palealis, is a moth of coastal areas in the south of England which uses wild carrot as its larval foodplant. In September we also found its caterpillars enclosed within the seed purses of wild carrot. The adult and caterpillar are shown below:

Below is the caterpillar of the camomile shark moth, spotted on an ox-eye daisy in June. The adult is quite a drab-looking moth but its caterpillars are quite the opposite and feed on various plants in the daisy family including camomile from whence they got their common name:

In January there was a small army of Luffia moth larvae grazing on lichen on the slate roof of an insect hotel. They have the most fascinating lifecycle – other than in Cornwall, there are only female Luffia moths and no males at all are involved in producing the young. The larvae develop from eggs without them needing to be fertilised. As well as that, the adult female Luffia moths are flightless and distribution is thought to be by wind:

The mothing year had its grande finale in mid September when Dave was hacking back a hedge from a telegraph pole in preparation for a visit by Openreach. He found a simply enormous convolvulus hawkmoth on the pole that had previously been covered by dense vegetation.

Since we were responsible for it no longer being safely hidden from the birds, we took it into safekeeping before releasing it at dusk:

Every year I attempt to get a decent photo of the delightful hairy-footed flower bees that visit my pots of ‘shrimps-on-the-barbie’ pulmonaria in the garden every April. To increase my chances I must have about seven pots of it now:

Despite my best efforts over several years, I am aware that I have only really scratched the surface with my knowledge of the invertebrates that live in the meadows. Here are some of the new discoveries I made in 2025:

Ruby-tailed wasps are often to be found hanging around the bee nesting boxes on the side of the shed, hoping to get an opportunity to lay their own eggs into the nest of a hard-working mason bee. There are several similar species of these wasps, though, and my photos had never been good enough to properly identify them. This photograph, though, taken by a visitor with a good macro camera was clear enough to identify it as Chrysura radians, a kleptoparasite of the red mason bee:

I saw this ornate-tailed digger wasp, Cerceris rybyensis, sheltering from the rain at the end of July:

I was so excited to see these tiny (2.5 to 3mm) ant-mimicking flies, Sepsis fulgens, below. They were mating at a badger latrine and the female will then lay her eggs into the badger dung. These flies are mimicking ants as a protection from potential predators who avoid ants because they can be unpalatable or aggressive:

Another fly is the four-banded bee-grabber, Conops quadrifasciatus:

A visitor to the meadows in August is interested in weevils and found us this armadillo weevil, Otiorhynchus armadillo:

Ladybirds seemed to do very well last year and I saw some species that I’d never seen before. The adonis ladybird on the left, the orange ladybird, known for feeding on mildew on sycamores rather than on the more usual aphids, top right and the checkered form of the ten-spot ladybird below it:

We also had a really good dragonfly year. This four-spotted chaser, seen emerging from the hide pond in June, was a new species for the meadows:

August is the time of year when we start looking out for wasp spiders amongst the tall vegetation. These large spiders are grasshopper specialists, building their webs low to the ground in the hope that one might jump in:

When we discover one of the webs, we watch it to see what prey the spider is catching. There have been all manner of unfortunate things that wind up in the webs but never a dragonfly before. Its wings have been wrapped in silken threads with its body arching over the top:

The most wasp spiders we have previously seen in any year is four. Last year, however, we did a more systematic search and found 149! Perhaps 2025 was an extraordinary year for wasp spiders or maybe we had just not looked properly before.

The year concluded with a final flourish for the meadows. Just before Christmas we had the wonderful news that, with much help from Kent Wildlife Trust, they have now been officially designated as a Local Wildlife Site, as an extension to the existing Kingsdown and Walmer Beach Local Wildlife Site. Although nothing much will change as a result, it is recognition of what a special place they are and I am looking forward to seeing what 2026 brings.

The UK experienced its sunniest spring and warmest summer on record in 2025, with challenging multiple heatwaves and high temperatures. East Kent is one of the driest parts of England, but thankfully this year we had just enough rainfall during the summer to keep the ponds ticking over and stop the vegetation from dying back, allowing the invertebrates to complete their lifecycles.

Birds of the Meadows

For several years now, we have been trying to do our bit for swifts and establish a breeding colony here in the meadows. It was a slow start but finally, in 2024, two swift chicks successfully fledged from a box attached to the side of the house. This was wonderful but, when the birds then departed for Africa at the end of July, we were very aware that the situation was precarious – our infant colony depended upon the two adult birds flying 4,000 miles down to equatorial Africa, both surviving the winter and then flying another 4,000 miles back again. What were the chances that we would ever see them again?

At the beginning of May 2025 we were on the south coast of France and spent some time with a group of cool young French people at a lofty watchpoint at Leucate where they were recording the birds arriving across the Mediterranean and into Europe. They were keeping a tally board and we could see that, by 2nd May, 121,931 swifts (Martinet noir) had already flown in over their heads. Some of these should hopefully have been continuing up through France and onwards to England.

When we got back home from France on 5th May, it was an immense relief to discover that our pair of swifts had arrived back before us and were overnighting in the box:

They took some time recovering from their journey and it was not until 22nd May that the first egg was laid, the second following two days later:

The birds then took it in turns to incubate the eggs whilst the other went out to feed. Both always spent the night together in the box though.

Then, on 11th June, just as we were once more leaving home for a holiday in Shetland, a cracked egg indicated that one or both of the chicks had hatched:

We returned on 22nd June and the two youngsters seemed to be doing very well in the box:

However, there was a problem – it quickly became apparent that this was now a single parent family with just one adult bringing them food:

Luckily the weather stayed fair in July which was good for flying insects levels, and the chicks seemed to thrive despite their loss:

On the 20th July one of the young birds was stretching out its wings in the box and preparing to launch:

When I next looked at the camera, it had fledged and just one chick remained in the box:

It took another four days for this second chick to build up the courage to leave the box but, by 7am on 24th July, the box was empty and it was all over for another year.

What will happen next year remains to be seen. We are already one adult down and the four chicks that have fledged from the box over the last two years are still too young to breed. I await next May with some trepidation.

However, there are some other promising leads for the development of our swift colony. The thermal camera showed that another pair of swifts were spending the nights in a neighbouring box. These were probably two year old birds that had chosen a partner and a nest site and, all being well, will be back next year to breed:

The boxes were also visited by swift ‘bangers’ in mid July. These are immature birds that are prospecting for vacant nest sites by banging on the box to see if they get a response:

Finally, we now have two new swift boxes installed in the wildlife tower on the garage. We were playing calls from these boxes in 2025 when the swifts were in the country and this was getting a lot of response with birds often circling the tower:

We haven’t seen one go in yet but we will try again this year.

The kestrels have had a busy year here in the meadows and have had the odd drama themselves.

The female kestrel is the grande dame of the meadows, having been ringed here as a young bird six years ago, and she has been here ever since.

She often gets bothered by the magpies who don’t want her around:

We have seen both her and her mate catch many rodents throughout the year, but particularly in the autumn once the meadows were cut:

She has also caught a variety of other prey such as bumblebees, newts and lizards. In 2025 she seemed to do particularly well with great green bush-crickets:

These bush-crickets are large and must be quite a good meal for her:

In mid August we saw what must surely be a juvenile kestrel. I have always presumed that our pair of kestrels nest in the nearby chalk cliffs and this might well be one of their young:

In October after the meadows were cut, we were seeing so much of the kestrels that Dave decided to try to digiscope them. This was when we realised that our leading lady had something very wrong with her eye:

I have to admit that I thought that this was going to be the end of her because how could she judge distances and effectively hunt with only one eye? But, whatever this was, it was thankfully quite short lived and within the week she was back to normal.

We have often heard both male and female tawny owls calling out in the meadows. This tawny has caught itself a mouse….

….and here is one with a rat:

2024 was a very good year for barn owls in the meadows. We saw less of them in 2025 but they do pose really nicely for the camera:

Another raptor was frequently seen in the autumn:

In my opinion magpies are far too successful here. Three chicks fledged this spring:

They are omnivores with a varied diet and it is always interesting to see what they find to eat. This magpie has two mice in its beak:

And I was surprised at how many wasps they were eating in the autumn:

Crows do well too. There were a pair of chicks this year:

I enjoyed seeing them being fed on the perches:

All sorts of food was going into the mouths of the chicks including seed and spiders.

Like the magpies they also have a wide diet and perhaps this is one of the reasons they both seem to flourish:

I had to also include this photo of a crow wearing a black tutu:

In mid June I was alerted to a tremendous furore outside the open backdoor. On investigation, I saw that a just-fledged blue tit had flown into the lobby by mistake and its anxious family were all calling for it outside:

The remains of the gape were still very evident at the sides of its beak:

I was easily able to gather the sweet little bird up in my hands and return it to its family who were still waiting for it by the door.

A juvenile cuckoo stayed in the meadows for two or three days in mid July on its way south to Africa for the winter. This was one of the absolute bird highlights of the year:

In August a spotty young green woodpecker was pecking around the garden path:

At the beginning of 2025 our meadow bird list stood at 98 species. It had been there, teetering on the brink of its century, since October 2023 when barn owl had been added. In April this year, John and John, the bird ringers, were trying out whoosh netting in the meadows:

While the ringers were the meadows whoosh netting, they heard a Mediterranean gull which went onto the list at 99. Then, when we were in Shetland in June, John saw a male golden oriole fly over the meadows. This was an amazing 100th bird to add to the list although it is a shame we hadn’t seen it ourselves of course.

A male golden oriole on the left, photo by Kookaburra 81 on Wiki Commons CCA-SA 4.0 and a turtle dove, Europe’s only long distance migratory dove, on the right, photo by El Golli Mohamed on Wiki Commons also under CCA-SA 4.0

The meadows used to be part of Operation Turtle Dove, a project set up to address the terrible decline in turtle doves in the UK. But, after three years of supplementary feeding for turtle doves and not having seen one, we didn’t want to spend any more of their money on seed and withdrew from the scheme. So it was therefore an amazing moment when, on 25th June, we finally heard a turtle dove purring in a holm oak by the wild pond. This was the 101st bird species for the meadows. Although I quickly redeployed several trail cameras to the pond in case it came down to drink, we unfortunately didn’t see the bird. It was only here for that one day but maybe it liked what it saw and will return in 2026.

John and John have also been ringing in the meadows using the more traditional method of mist netting. They caught seven species of warbler in just one session on 8th September. Since we were away these are their photos of lesser whitethroat, willow warbler, and chiffchaff and, below, garden warbler, female blackcap and male blackcap. They also caught reed warbler and common whitethroat. All these species will have been about to leave the country for the winter:

In November and December, John ringed seven firecrests in just three sessions. One of them was recaught three weeks later, suggesting that it is overwintering here.

The colourful top of a firecrest’s head:

The amazing firecrest finishes Part One of the annual review for the meadows. I have really enjoyed trawling through my 2025 posts to pull together the most interesting bird photos of the year – and what a year it has been. I will now repeat the process, but for the mammals and invertebrates photos that will make up Part Two, coming soon!