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.