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.