February is an exciting month in the British wildlife calendar. More lovely spring flowers are appearing daily, invertebrates are finally starting to emerge and the amphibian breeding season gets underway. The soft churring of male frogs from the meadow ponds is now one of my favourite sounds.

But frog numbers are really down in the meadows this year. It was certainly a very dry spring last year, which was not good news for tadpole survival, but common frogs live an average of 5-7 years in the wild and should be able to cope with the occasional unsuccessful year. Herons have not been an issue recently and there is no obvious sign of disease, so we don’t know what the problem is and it’s all very perplexing.

This time lapse photo taken by a trail camera in 2018 gives some indication of quite how many frogs used to gather in the wild pond:

Then, in 2019, there was a massacre when every single frog in the pond was picked off by a heron, but since then numbers had gradually been recovering. This year, however, only a handful of males have turned up and so far there are only two clumps of spawn, indicating that just two females have arrived.

Although I have been observing and worrying about frogs in the meadows for the last decade, I am relatively new to watching the toads in the Queen Mother’s pond at Walmer Castle. So I am unable to say if the forty-two toads that we saw there one night this week is an increase in numbers or a decline, but I do know, however, that I absolutely love to see them:

We visited the pond again in the daylight a couple of days later and found that strings of spawn were being laid:

Back in the meadows, invertebrates are now starting to appear. This is an oak gall wasp that was on the windscreen of the car:

The large and ponderous western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, is native to North America but was introduced to Europe in 1999 and has since spread rapidly. We often see them here:

And the first butterfly was seen in the meadows on 24th February. This peacock will have spent the winter as an adult, probably tucked away in a tree:

The 2026 ringing season has got underway when John spent a morning this week in the wood. He ringed thirty-eight birds, most of which were blue tits and great tits. He did however, catch both a male and a female great spotted woodpecker:

There were some outstanding jobs resulting from our maintenance tour of the dormice boxes and large raptor bird boxes last week.

Dave has made a new floor for this barn owl box to replace the previous one that was rotting:

Eight of the dormice boxes needed replacing because of squirrel damage, like this one below:

I had ordered new boxes that have now arrived and gone up in the wood. The monthly dormouse monitoring tours will start in April

We also needed to locate and clean out the twenty-eight small bird boxes. It was a bit of a challenge to remember where they all were:

We found bird nests in nineteen of them. This bird box below had had a very busy year. There is a wedge of decaying blue tit nest at the very bottom of the box, and above that is a black layer of a tree bumblebee nest. Once the bees had departed by midsummer, a dormouse moved in and made its nest at the top

Back in June we had noticed the tree bumblebees in the box but they didn’t stay very long:

But it was this triple-holed bird box that delivered the biggest surprise:

There wasn’t a dormouse nest in the box, but we did however find an active dormouse:

If temperatures are mild, then dormice do sometimes wake up during the winter and will go back into hibernation again if it gets colder. This uses up precious energy reserves though and ideally they need to forage to top their levels up while they are awake. Luckily there are lots of hazel catkins around now to eat, so this little one should be alright.

On two gloriously warm and sunny February days this week we completed our winter’s coppicing work:

We feel quite pleased with what we have an achieved this year:

As if to underline the fact that winter is over and it is time to stop working in the wood before the birds start to breed, our new clearing was alive with lime-green brimstone butterflies. There were so many of them flying through, some stopping briefly to nectar up on the the few primroses that are already starting to flower:

Brimstone butterflies hibernate as adults in dense evergreen vegetation such as ivy and holly. Once they awaken, they particularly like to feed on primroses and pretty soon now the woodland floor will be awash with these.

After those two warm sunny days, I ran the moth trap in the meadows to see if they had made a difference to the number of moths around. They surely had because I caught seven different species including this oak beauty which I think might be one of the most attractive moths I’ve ever come across :

The oak beauty is apparently a common moth found primarily in mature oak woodland but I had never seen one before or even noticed it in the field guides. So it was an exciting surprise and what a wonderful launch of the 2026 mothing season.