We are involved with KLAW – Kent Landholders Assisting Wildlife – and from time to time visits are arranged to see what fellow members of the group are getting up to on their land. This week we visited a 200 hectare farm near Marden, south of Maidstone. It was in the Low Weald where the clay soil means that the land is often wet and is dotted with numerous ponds.

Only half of the farm is under agriculture these days. The rest of the land doesn’t lend itself so well to growing crops, and the owners are restoring it to species-rich neutral grasslands by natural regeneration, the spreading of green hay and by sowing Weald-provenance seed.

There is also a large ancient woodland there, which was blanketed in glorious bluebells for our visit:

The Wild service tree is a very rare tree these days and we hadn’t seen one before. But they do grow well in the Low Weald and there were several beautiful specimens in the wood:

Part of the woodland had recently been thinned and rides created. All this hard work had been rewarded, though, because a nightingale had just arrived a few days previously and we were serenaded by his song:

Over the course of the morning we were shown many rare and vulnerable plants that are being nurtured on the farm. One of these was the true fox-sedge, Carex vulpina. Clumps of this large sedge were growing in a circle around what is a pond in the winter. Now, in April, the water has gone, but these conditions are perfect for this very rare plant to thrive:

But it was the green-winged orchids that stole the show. Last year over three thousand were counted on the farm.

We came away inspired by the care and passion that was that was being put into the restoration of the meadows and wood at the farm. We also came away with a young wild service tree to try to grow here in the meadows. Or probably we should plant it in the wood? What a responsibility:

After we had left Marden and were making our way back up to Maidstone, we went through a village called Loose. We found this sign, quickly snapped on my phone, very amusing:

We are now on tenterhooks whilst we await the return of the swifts to the boxes on the side of the house. Will they have survived another migration all the way down to equatorial or even southern Africa and back?

In the photo above, the boxes at 1 are house martin nests which are regularly nested in by house sparrows. Box 2, the left hand side of the semi-detached box, has never been used. Box 3 has been nested in by swifts for the last two summers and four chicks have successfully fledged from it. Box 4 has been hurriedly put up this week. Last summer box 5 was being roosted in by a pair of two year-old swifts and we are hoping that they will return this year to raise young. Box 6 has only just gone up. Box 7, facing east, has often been used by house sparrows. We will also be playing swifts calls again this year from two further swift boxes in the wildlife tower on the garage. This attracted a lot of swift attention last year but we don’t think any bird entered the boxes.

Box 3 and box 5 are the boxes that had swifts in them last year, and now both have cameras installed in them. I am seeing on social media that swifts are arriving back at their boxes all over the country and I’m checking our nest cameras daily but nothing so far.

Dave spotted something quite exciting in the meadows this week:

This is the paper wasp Polistes biglumis. It doesn’t have an English name yet because it was only first accepted onto the British list in 2020 when some individuals were seen in Samphire Hoe country park just down the coast. Since then there have been a few more sightings in coastal regions of East Kent. In German the species is called ‘Berg Feldwespe‘ meaning ‘mountain field wasp’ because it lives in high meadows in the Alpine region. This is the second Polistes species to make it to the UK – Polistes dominula arrived in 2003

Our wasp in the meadows is a female and she is building herself a nest on some wild privet:

In their normal range of the Alpine meadows, the adults feed on plant nectar, but do take caterpillars and other invertebrates to chew up and feed to their young. Although several of these wasps were found at Samphire Hoe in 2020 and breeding was presumed, as far as we can tell this may be the first time a nest has been found in this country.

We have come across a Polistes species wasp before when we saw a very similar wasp and nest in the Vercors, a mountainous region of France, back in May 2022:

The wasp in the meadows is building her nest alongside the 85 metres of new hedgerow that was planted about five years ago. It is a mix of many different native species and it is looking rather lovely these days:

Some of the hedge has started to flower and bear fruit now, adding to the winter larder that we can provide for the birds.

Spindle is one of the species in the hedge and at this time of year every spindle plant along the length has several nets of spindle ermine moth caterpillars on them. Once the caterpillars emerge from the sticky webbing that is currently protecting them, there will be many thousands available to feed young birds this spring:

Birds are nesting around the meadows now and I am pleased to see tits going into some of our boxes. We enjoyed watching this woodpigeon through the utility room window. Both male and female woodpigeon share the responsibility of building the nest, incubation of the eggs and feeding the young. But it is the male who generally gathers the nesting material and brings it to the female. She stays at the nest and constructs the platform. The male stayed perched up here on the fence for quite a while – long enough for me to go off to find my camera – before disappearing into the privet hedge where presumably his mate was waiting for him:

I have seen the first damselfly down by the wild pond:

Male green hairstreak butterflies are highly territorial, engaging in fierce dog-fights with other males to defend their perches. The winner of the battle will return to his favourite spot, often one or two metres above ground in the hedgerow, to await a female. It seems unlikely, but a lot of this delicate butterfly’s adult life is spent in combat:

I have just finished the Field Studies Council online course ‘ Introduction to Spiders’. I have always had an innate adverse reaction to spiders. I think that humans must have evolved in a part of the world where there were dangerous spiders so a fear of them is written onto our DNA. However, having now completed the course, I know so much more about these intriguing creatures. I find myself viewing them differently – more as interesting biological beings that are an important part of an ecosystem, rather than letting my irrational knee-jerk response take over.

So it was in this new frame of mind that I viewed this tiny green cucumber spider (Araniella cucurbitina or A. opistographa) at work on her enormous St Mark’s fly prey. The little spider had woven a sticky web within the margins of the leaf and the fly had made the mistake of landing on it:

The baby badgers are starting to wander around without their mother now. It has been such a dry spring, though, and I am worrying about them. We need some rain so that the badgers and the birds can get at the worms:

I had a bit of a treat in the wood this week. Crouching down in the marjoram clearing to change the SD card in the trail camera, I noticed a grass snake at the side of the pond less than a metre away. I quietly reached for my camera….

As I watched, the snake entered the water and slowly swam away from me along the length of the pond:

There are tadpoles in this small pond again this year, although perhaps not for much longer.

In the next few days John and John the bird ringers are going to have a look in the tawny owl box. The infrared camera is in no doubt that there is something warm in there, but what shall we find?

I should be able to tell you by the next post…

This week it was time for the first monitoring tour of the year around the dormouse boxes and we were looking forward to it:

This time there was a little team of four of us going round: Dave as scribe, the bird ringer John as equipment assistant and with a special interest in the bird nests found in the boxes, his wife Clare as photographer and me as licensed handler. All these dormouse photos are Clare’s.

We found five dormice over the course of the morning. They are not long out of hibernation and three of them hadn’t started making nests for themselves. This one in box 3 was in an otherwise completely empty box:

The two in box 16 below were on a bit of moss but this would almost certainly have been brought in by birds:

The dormouse in box 9, however, had built a nest already. It was not a typical nest though, with those brown leaves rather than fresh green hazel leaves. It did have stripped bark incorporated into it though:

The dormouse nest in box 22 was small but perfectly formed with a beautiful spherical core of woven stripped honeysuckle bark and green hazel leaves:

The dormouse living in this box had survived a significant injury:

Between 40% and 70% of British hazel dormice die during winter hibernation and so the five we saw this month are already heroes having survived until spring. Let’s hope they now go on to breed and raise some families.

This April I am on a quest to see if scarce prominent moths are living in the wood. These moths only really fly in April and are always found in association with mature silver birch or downy birch which are their larval food plants. I ran the battery moth trap overnight on the edge of the large stand of lovely silver birch trees in the wood:

This was the third time this month that I’ve tried for the scarce prominent moth but I haven’t seen it yet. I did, however, get three other moths that are strongly linked with birch:

It is very pleasing to set the moth trap up alongside birch trees and then go on to catch a selection of birch-loving moths. Admittedly I have not yet caught a scarce prominent, but April is not over and I will keep on trying.

All is continuing well with the breeding tawny owls in the nest box, and discussions are underway in the background to organise the ringing of the chicks in due course:

I have seen squirrels, stock doves, great tits and blue tits looking into the box while the owls have been nesting, but this photo below was a bit of a surprise:

It had been bathing at the shallow pool that is in the same clearing as the owl box and I think it just wanted to perch on that sturdy horizontal branch rather than it being interested in the owls.

A few days later it arrived for another bath and then returned once more to that same perch:

A different buzzard with many more brown feathers was at a different woodland pond this week:

Buzzards are resident in the wider woods and I would love to know where they are nesting.

The green woodpeckers are continuing to show interest in the hole in the cherry tree but I haven’t yet seen them actually go in. As we continue to monitor the hole, we are seeing other things as well, such as this sparrowhawk on a fly by:

There are also green woodpeckers across in the meadows and a male has regularly been coming down to the wild pond for a drink and a wash:

This week John managed to catch him in his net:

Here is a photo of a juvenile green woodpecker’s tongue from Wiki Commons:

Whilst the green woodpecker rather stole the show, John did catch several other birds in the meadows this week, including a male blackcap to match the female that he had caught the week before:

I can now tell you that there are three lovely badger cubs in the meadows this spring. Their mother has taken them to a burrow right down at the end of the second meadow to the place we call the amphitheatre:

There is a lot of interest in the nightly peanuts at this time of year with babies to be fed. It has also been a really dry spring yet again so the badgers are hungry, being unable to get to the worms that should be making up around 80% of their diet.

Two of the foxes have mange and, as well as the peanuts, I have been giving them a remedy sprinkled onto honey sandwiches. But getting the sandwiches into the right animal is a game of strategy requiring exquisite timing. Put the food out too late and the badgers come charging out and chase the foxes off. If it goes out too early then the magpies dart in. I tie myself up in knots trying to get it right.

The foxes have just now finished the six-week course of the Arsen Sulphur remedy and so I have stopped it. We are waiting on tenterhooks to see if it has worked.

I have put together a gallery of some of the other birds that frequent the meadows but rarely get a mention here:

Sparrowhawks so regularly patrol the hedgerows and land on the perches that I’ve ceased to comment on them and a small group of extraordinary-looking feral pigeons have recently started to wait for the daily seed spread onto the strip. Several pheasants overwintered here and at least two still remain. These non-native birds are not really welcome because they will be hoovering up the wildlife, so we hope that they will decide to move on soon. A pair of herring gulls have adopted the meadows this spring and are also very interested in the daily seed and we love to see these characterful birds. There are always plenty of wood pigeon and stock doves around.

It is lovely to have the reptiles back sunbathing in the meadows:

And green hairstreaks have arrived:

Moth traps draw in moths from far and wide and are great for monitoring what species are about. But there is also something rather wonderful about finding a moth doing its thing in its natural environment. I like to see where they have decided to roost up for the day, attempting to hide themselves from the birds. How do they even know what they look like and therefore where they will be disguised?

An example of this is a broad-barred white moth found roosting on a bit of poorly-painted door furniture. It was indeed difficult to see – but how did it know that?

For a further example we return to the stand of silver birch in the wood. Another specialist birch moth is the grey birch button micro moth that spends the daylight hours hidden in plain sight on the trunk of a silver birch

This week I nearly missed a streamer moth roosting on a metal bolt:

I find this all completely fascinating. Every day during the summer there are many thousands of night-flying moths hiding themselves in the meadows and I rarely see a single one of them. So I have set Dave and myself a brand new project this year to specifically search for them and see what wonders we can find.

I finish today with swifts. On 2nd May last year we were standing at the Leucate migration watch point in the Languedoc-Roussillon part of France on the Mediterranean coast.

I have stumbled upon an interesting website that provides all sorts of migration count information:

I can see that, now a year on, thousands of swifts are once more flooding back into Europe over the heads of the birdwatchers at Leucate. This is very exciting but we are not quite ready for them here yet and want to get two more nest boxes up before they return. We had better get a move on because they are on their way..

We have had some really fine weather here recently and John the bird-ringer has been catching newly-arrived summer visitors in the meadows.

There is also loud chiffchaffing emanating from the hedgerows these days and here is the unassuming bird that is responsible for that:

The blackcap’s song is beautifully melodious. It’s the males that are singing, but here is one of the females that they are trying to impress:

Linnets are partial migrants. Many remain in this country over the winter, forming large flocks on farmland that has some winter food, but a significant number migrate instead to southern France, Spain and Morocco. Either way, lovely linnets have recently arrived back here in the meadows to breed this summer:

John also caught a pair of robins. The first one he ringed was a male but the second, when gently blown upon through a tube, could be seen to have a nearly fully developed brood patch. This indicates that she’s a female and should soon be sitting on eggs. This brood patch has a really good blood supply to keep the eggs warm:

As John was at work with his nets, Dave and I took the dog around the meadows with her ball. We were walking along the northern boundary when I heard a small commotion going on in the hedgerow. I peered in and was flabbergasted to see that it was a water rail, struggling to get itself deeper into the bushes as we passed by.

I did get a good look at it but unfortunately was too stunned to act quickly. I failed to get a photo before the bird worked its way to the bottom of the hedge and out of sight.

Here is a photo of a water rail from Wiki Commons though:

It is thought that around 3,900 pairs of water rails breed in the UK with the numbers boosted in the winter by birds coming from colder parts of Europe. But they are very secretive wetland birds, usually hiding themselves amongst reeds and are difficult to properly count.

I presume that the water rail in our hedgerow this week must be en route back to its breeding grounds in Continental Europe. They are strongly nocturnal when they migrate, so would probably have stayed in the hedge all day and emerged when it got dark to fly across The Channel. I positioned a couple of trial cameras in case it came out onto the grass in front of the hedge before it flew off.

Unfortunately the bird left the hedge that evening without emerging in front of my cameras. I had never in a million years thought that we would have a water rail on the meadows bird list, but there it now is, nestling in at number 103.

An alexander is a tall, thuggish plant, forming dense stands that outcompete native flora and is a real problem here on the East Kent coast.

For the first few years after taking on the meadows, we were naive and insufficiently vigilant, letting alexanders grow and set seed in the meadows in a most foolhardy manner. This photo taken out the front of Walmer Castle this week demonstrates what can happen when you let down your guard in this way:

A thick hedge of the hated plant lines much of the coastal footpath between Walmer and Kingsdown at this time of year:

By the time we woke up to the threat and took it seriously, we already had thousands of alexander plants growing in the meadows. So many, in fact, that it is impossible to dig them all up in one go.

The same cannot be said for the ones that flower deep within the spiky hedgerows though:

The unwanted alexander successfully extricated from the back of the hedgerow:

Our approach for several years now has been to dig up any alexander that starts to flower and, since January, I have been regularly patrolling with my spade. I have removed hundreds of them and, now in mid April, the plants that remain will not be flowering this year. I will continue to be vigilant for a few weeks more, but can tell you now that no alexander will set seed in the meadows for another year. The war is far from over, however, and battle will recommence next January.

It’s wonderful to have the invertebrates out and about again and how I have missed them. This week I have been trying to photograph some flying insects as they feed from flowers.

A bee-fly is a sweet little thing so long as you don’t look too closely into its parasitic lifestyle. It has a rigid proboscis which cannot be retracted:

Green alkanet has flower tubes and that are shorter than the length of a bee-fly’s rigid proboscis, so the fly has to hover away from the flower as it drinks the nectar:

A primrose, however, has a flower tube that is longer than the bee-fly proboscis:

Although this photo below from 2023 is unfortunately not in focus, it shows a bee-fly that has just fed on a primrose and its pale trombone tongue is still extended from the proboscis:

There are lots of cowslips in the meadows at the moment and this is another example of a very long flower tube needing specialised mouthparts to access the nectar. I have only ever seen bumble bees feeding from these, although I suspect that moths also do under the cover of darkness.

Unlike the bee-flies, a bumblebee can curl its proboscis away when not in use but in the photo below the bee is approaching a cowslip with it unfurled and ready for action:

The red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius), however, has a tongue that is less than a third of the length of the garden bumblebee, at about 6mm. This shorter length means they prefer shallower flowers and I have been seeing them a lot on dandelions this week. They can also bite holes into the sides of the deeper flowers to reach the nectar though.

I am a great hairy-footed flower bee enthusiast and now have six pots of Pulmonaria by the front door in the hope of luring these lovely bees into the garden so that I can admire them.

It is wonderful to have bees flying all around once more, but it can be so very frustrating trying to photograph them in action.

The reptiles are also up and out now:

Unfortunately its not just us that has spotted them and here is a slow worm in a magpie’s beak:

As we have been looking under the reptile sampling squares we’ve found a variety of small mammals, although they are fast and photography is again difficult. A nice bank vole here though:

I have run the moth trap several times both in the meadows and in the wood and have been getting some interesting moths, many of which I have never seen before. So far this year I have already added a pleasing nineteen new species to the meadows moth list and nine for the wood.

For their safety, I release the caught moths from the trap the next evening after the birds have roosted. When I went to let them fly one evening, I found that love had blossomed in the trap:

My rough calculation suggested that the tawny owl eggs in a box in the wood might be hatching over the Easter weekend, but so far I have not noticed a change in behaviour that suggests that this has happened. Several small mammals are being delivered to the box overnight but perhaps still only by the one bird:

These two photos below were taken on the same night, one at 10.30pm in the evening and the other at 5am the next morning. I would think that an owl wouldn’t need to take two baths a night at this time of year, and that this must be two different birds, one of which will be the female away from her eggs or young:

I have been seeing a nice variety of small birds visiting this pond recently including bullfinch, siskin and redpoll. Obviously not while this bird was there though:

A different pond has been visited by a buzzard this week:

There is a lot going on at this time of year and I have had to leave out many interesting photos to avoid this post becoming far too long and unwieldy. I do want to include these last two photos, though, where the good old trail cameras have managed to capture animals flying through the air:

I find myself more than usually busy with nature at this lovely time of year. I hope that you too have been able to get out and about to experience and enjoy the wonderful spring as she is gradually arriving.,

After a long, dark winter, it’s extremely heartening when everything starts coming to life again in spring. This year there is a very special highlight in the wood with tawny owls once more nesting in one of the boxes.

We are trying to get better photos of them but, with the female now on eggs, anything we do in the vicinity has to be really quick and quiet so as not to scare her.

It is exclusively the female bird that will be incubating the eggs. She will stay on them pretty much continuously for the 28-30 days that they take to hatch, with the male bringing her food. Having done a rough calculation based on when I last saw both birds out and about together, my best guess is that the eggs will start hatching over the upcoming Easter weekend.

There should be two or three eggs in the box which will be white and smooth and roughly the size of a golf ball:

Ideally the camera could do with moving a bit further back because the birds are not quite in focus but we don’t think we can do that now without disturbing her.

Lots of mice have been arriving by night:

I suppose it is inevitable that some of these rodents being brought to the box are going to be dormice, but it’s difficult to tell in the dark. I did think the thickness of this rodent’s tail below looked suspiciously dormouse-like:

We have now trained a second camera onto the box as well. This one is quite a long way away but it might get some good shots when the chicks start branching out of the box:

Every day stock doves come and forlornly hang around the box. I don’t know why they haven’t cut their losses, realised that the box is already occupied this year, and gone to look for somewhere else to nest:

The owls are frequently coming down to bathe in the pond in the marjoram clearing:

They are properly bathing, not just drinking:

Another camera is now once more looking at the hole in a cherry tree where green woodpeckers have nested for the previous two years. The birds have been inspecting the hole this spring, but so far haven’t committed themselves. The camera has been seeing other things, though, such as this hare going past on the track behind:

A burrow that was used as a fox den a few years ago has had a camera on it ever since, and it is interesting to see how many things stop by. Rabbits, foxes, squirrels and badgers are regular visitors and recently a polecat-like mustelid was also peering in. This week, however, it was the turn of an enormous buzzard who is very partial to a bit of rabbit:

The Common twayblade is an easily-overlooked orchid being yellow-green and less showy than other UK orchids. Several have now started to come up in their normal spot. It looks like the slugs and snails have been enjoying them as well:

Now that I have a battery powered moth trap, I have gone mobile! I am really interested to see what moths live in the wood and intend to do some trapping there this year. I set the trap up overnight this week well away from where the tawnies are nesting:

The scarce prominent is one moth species that flies in April and which I am hoping lives in the wood. Its larvae feed on mature silver birch and we do have a lot of these, so I was feeling quite optimistic. However, all positivity evaporated the next morning when we returned to the wood and found the trap completely empty. I will try again next week and will surely catch something then.

Over in the meadows, a pair of mallards visit our ponds at this time every year for some rest and recreation. The female duck is egg-laying and is weakened by this energy-intensive process, so the male accompanies her wherever she goes as her bodyguard.

Mallards can seem so ordinary and domestic when they are dabbling around on a boating lake, being fed bread by toddlers. But when they arrive here in the meadows the feel of them is very different, like a pair of properly wild ducks.

Last year a mallard laid her eggs at the bottom of my sister’s Berkshire garden. There were eleven eggs, each slightly larger than a typical chicken egg, so it is easy to see that the female would need to recuperate whilst she is laying them:

This year’s ducks have been spending large periods of time down at the wild pond. After an extended swim, they often get out of the water to do some preening:

And then have a little snooze:

However, it’s important that they always keep an eye open because a couple of minutes after the photo above was taken, this happened:

Foxes are perfectly capable of swimming but this one obviously decided that, once he had lost the element of surprise, pursuing them any further was unlikely to succeed:

The next day he tried again but with the same result and with the ducks still unscathed on the water:

I have to apologise about the state of the pond. For the first time last summer it developed some blanket weed even though we are always extremely careful not to add nutrients. The weed has unfortunately returned this spring and it is a most unattractive look. We are hoping that, if we ignore it, it will eventually sort itself out and go away again.

Up at the top of the second meadow, I see that the mangey vixen has had her cubs and is now copiously lactating:

It is always interesting to see what the magpies are finding to eat. Here is the ringed bird with a snail:

And here, unfortunately, it has caught itself a vole:

This year’s nest building is obviously reaching the final stages, with some soft lining going in:

The jay is a bird often to be seen around the meadows. They must surely nest in the vicinity but I have never had any indication of where that might be:

A female blackbird rejecting the advances on a male on the gate. He has managed to make himself look so threatening:

To see the ringed female kestrel, now approaching her seventh birthday and still hunting in the meadows, is another Easter treat for me:

Her ringed right leg seen below confirms that this is the same bird:

As we wait with bated breath to see if there are any badger cubs this year, I now have cameras on three of the entrances to the sett. This swirl of badgers is at the entrance to a burrow on the cliff:

A badger is emerging from a second tunnel, a relatively newly-dug one that opens directly up into the meadows:

This third badger hole below has had fresh bedding dragged into it this week so might be a contender to be the one where the cubs first appear. It too opens out into the meadows but is covered by a thick tangle of brambles:

Looking back at my records over the past ten years, I see that the earliest that we had previously seen a badger cub above ground is 7th April. But now, just as I was about to publish this post, I have some late-arriving news. The photo below is of the second burrow and, just visible in the bottom right, is a small badger cub:

I hope to have better photos by next time.

We have some of the family coming for Easter and I have been happily decorating the house with lots of eggs and other things in lovely pastel shades:

With the weather here currently forecast to be fair at the weekend, I wish you a very enjoyable and chocolatey Easter.