We have returned from the Isles of Scilly to find the meadows bathed in a brilliant white. In all the years we have been here, there has never been such a magnificent show of oxeye daisies:

Perhaps some might think that this concentration of these large plants will be swamping other things out, but these are beautiful native plants and are offering up an immense amount of pollen, so it’s difficult to be too cross with them.

We set out to discover what invertebrates are making use of this completely overwhelming number of flowers:

Painted lady butterflies certainly seem to love them. These butterflies are long-distance migrants, starting out from North Africa and the Middle East in the early spring each year. From there they spread across Europe in a multi-generational migration, since each individual only lives a few weeks, and they arrive in Britain from May onwards. In the autumn they start heading south again and return to their starting point, completing a 9,000 mile circuit. Lots of them have arrived in the meadows already and can be seen dancing amongst the daisies:

All sorts of beetle gorge on the vast amount of pollen produced by the flowers:

We also saw swollen-thighed beetles (Oedemera nobilis), malachite beetles (Malachius bipustulatus) and lots of tiny beetles that are so minuscule and covered in pollen that I feel I have no chance of identifying them:

But what we will remember most about this enjoyable search amongst the daisies are the spiders. The common crab spider, Xysticus cristata, is an ambush predator that waits for something to land on the flower and then pounces on it.

It was only when I loaded this photo onto my computer and had a proper look at it that I saw that her prey was another spider. In fact, it is actually a male of the same species that she is eating:

I don’t know whether he had just mated with her and no longer served any purpose other than as a meal, or perhaps he had tried to court her but she wasn’t impressed. Either way it did not end well for him. This spring I have been trying to understand spiders a bit more so that I can get to like them, but they don’t do themselves any favours with this sort of behaviour.

This is another spider that lies in wait for visitors to the flower. She stays stock still with her long legs spread out and ready for immediate action:

Below is the male of the species, smaller and with brown markings but with the same really long first pair of legs:

I had never seen this next spider before but I knew what it was the instant I spotted it. It’s the cricket bat spider (Mangora acalypha):

I really enjoyed this week’s oxeye daisy project, although I now have the yellow and white flowers imprinted on my retinas.

It was pleasing to get a photo of this furry hoverfly in the meadows this week. He’s trying really hard to look like a white-tailed bumblebee, but he plopped himself down onto this leaf in a most un-bee like manner which is what caught my attention. He also has big fly-eyes, only a single set of wings and short, wispy antennae:

This is the bumblebee mimic hoverfly, Volucella bombylans (var plumata), and he is imitating a stinging white-tailed bumblebee to avoid bird predation. The female hoverfly also uses this disguise to trick her way into a bumblebee nest to lay her eggs, although she will also use social wasp nests. The hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest, as well as occasionally also eating the bee or wasp larvae.

Our precious colony of small blue butterflies has now emerged and there is a lot of kidney vetch around to support them this summer:

Mating small heaths using a daisy as their platform:

The 22-spot ladybird is also very small at only 3-5mm and it eats the mildew on a variety of plants:

While we were away we had an unusual visitor to the meadows:

As the bird flew off the perch, you can also make out its red trousers:

Here is a much better photo of the bird from Wiki Commons:

This bird will probably have migrated back to the UK along with the swifts, using them as a mobile larder. Now that it has arrived back in the UK, it will switch from eating swifts to acrobatically catching dragonflies midair in its claws.

I am pleased to say that the three swifts that we were expecting back have avoided the attentions of the hobby and all have arrived in their boxes.

I have numbered to boxes that we now have up on the side of the house in the photo below:

Box 3 is the most successful with four young swifts fledging from it over the last couple of years. But last summer there was unfortunately only a single parent bringing them up. This bird arrived back in the box on 8th May this year:

Having arrived, the swift then disappeared for a few days, returned for a night, went off for another few days and then, overnight on on 20th May, there were two of them:

But my celebration was short lived because that was just for one night. We are now back to there being just one swift in the box each night. The bird has removed all the old bedding and the box is now bare. Some of the ejected nest material has got caught on spider webbing in front of the camera and created the white splodge.

There wasn’t a camera in box 5 last year but we know that the pair of swifts had claimed it and were roosting in there every night. Over the winter, when the birds were away, Dave installed a camera in the box and we can now see that both birds have successfully returned:

The hobby timed its arrival perfectly because dragonflies are now emerging from the ponds:

There are also lots of damselflies around the ponds but I shouldn’t imagine a hobby would bother with these:

It has been so very dry which are difficult conditions for the badgers who are trying to eat worms. Nevertheless, they are doing what they can.

A little foraging group out and about, cub leading the way:

The remains of a bumblebee nest that they dug out one night to get at the grubs:

Over in the wood, the owl excitement is over for another year and all four tawny owl chicks fledged on 11th May. Earlier on that day, the adult seemed to be encouraging them out of the box:

Then, at around 4pm, one of the chicks launched itself from the box and can be seen in the bottom right below:

Most unfortunately, the main camera looking at the box wasn’t in quite the right position and this is the best it managed of this exciting event:

Again around 4pm, another of the chicks scrabbled up the tree. It would have then hidden itself further up while the parents continued to bring it food.

But after 4pm on 11th there has been minimal activity at the box, indicating that all the chicks left around the same time. So that’s it for another year, but I do so hope they choose to nest there again next year.

We were very pleased with how many tadpoles were wriggling around in the pond in the marjoram clearing. However, we weren’t the only ones to notice them. Unfortunately a pair of crows have systematically fished them all out and we can no longer see any at all.

I finish today with a little group of four great tits that I presume have recently fledged. John the bird ringer has been on a mission this spring to ring all the baby blue tits and great tits that are being raised in the bird and dormice boxes. This project has just finished with a total of 117 blue tit and 20 great tit chicks being ringed.

When he puts his nets up later in the year it will be really interesting to see what percentage of the tits being caught fledged from the boxes this spring.

It was an alarmingly wet and windy forecast for the week of our family holiday to the Isles of Scilly. This was definitely not what we had been hoping for, but in the end the weather was much better than predicted and we only got wet on one day. The wind, however, meant that the seal snorkelling we had booked was cancelled and we were unable to take any wildlife boat trips.

Some of us caught the small plane over to the Scillies from Newquay, but most of us either drove or caught the sleeper train down to Penzance and travelled over on the Scillonian:

It was indeed a very rough crossing out but at least we got to enjoy Lizzie’s seasickness glasses:

We were staying on Tresco, an island where twenty red squirrels were reintroduced in 2013 and have since thrived with the population now growing to more than a hundred:

The Gulf Stream creates a mild, generally frost-free climate on the Islands, allowing a wonderful variety of succulents to grow:

And Echiums were everywhere:

I did, however, notice that there weren’t the numbers and variety of invertebrates around that we would be seeing at home at this time of year. We were pleased to see this very large and hairy grass eggar moth caterpillar on Bryher though:

It was also nice to see black oil beetles, Meloe proscarabaeus, both on Bryher and on Tresco:

Green tiger beetles were also seen in the heathy area to the north of Tresco:

On 9th January this year, Storm Goretti hit the islands hard, with wind speeds of 99mph recorded at St Mary’s airport. The resulting damage from the storm was still very much in evidence:

We were keeping a group bird list and together we saw 37 species over the course of the week, although no doubt we would have done much better had we been able to go on some wildlife boat trips. There were certainly many more song thrush, blackbirds and house sparrows about than we would normally see:

And wherever the habitat got heathy, there were plenty of stonechat:

Tresco also has feral populations of both Lady Amherst’s and Golden pheasants:

Dave has always loved to poke around in rock pools and his children consequently knew how to sex a crab and other such matters from a very early age:

This week he had the opportunity to start again with the next generation:

I hadn’t seen a swimming crab before. The fifth pair of legs in these crabs from the Portunidae family are flattened into paddles allowing them to swim:

A shanny, Blennius pholis, is a fish of the rocks and stones of the lower shore:

Epitonium clathrus, the common wentletrap:

Tresco is separated from the neighbouring island of Bryher by a narrow strait of water:

But on one day of the holiday the tide was low enough to allow us to walk across to Bryher:

However, the tide was not quite low enough for us to keep our feet completely dry all the way across:

On a previous visit to the islands there was a super-low tide, allowing us to walk from Tresco across to the uninhabited island of Samson which was very memorable indeed.

Staying on Tresco worked very well with our large family group of sixteen since, as well as the long sandy beaches, it has swimming pools, a spa, a well-stocked supermarket, bike hire and several cafes and restaurants. It also had the subtropical Abbey Gardens to admire:

Scilly’s rocky shores have long been treacherous and over the years there have been hundreds of wrecks. The Abbey Gardens has a collection of 19th century figureheads that once belonged to merchant sailing ships or early steam vessels that were lost on the rocks around the Isles of Scilly.

The daymark on St Martin’s Head is a 36ft high granite pillar that has stood there since 1683 and is used for navigation. On a good day it can be seen from the Cornish coast.

In 1830 the Hope was wrecked on St Martin’s Head when the captain mistook the daymark, which was painted entirely white at the time, for the white lighthouse on the island of St Agnes. An unknown West African boy was drowned and is buried in the graveyard on St Martins.

As a result of the wrecking of the Hope, red stripes were painted onto the daymark to distinguish it from the white St Agnes lighthouse.

The Scilly Islands are not so very far off the coast of Britain but are set in rough seas. From early November until mid-March, when the Scillonian and all the scheduled inter-island boats stop running, things must feel very different there. One of our group was talking to an islander who said that, at one point last winter, no freight reached the islands for five weeks and this included delivery of fresh food into the supermarkets.

All around are signs of isolated island life:

I finish with a photo of the magnificent flower arrangement in Tresco church, all cut from plants growing wild on the island:

This was our third visit to the Scillies, the previous two being in October when the islands are packed with birdwatchers twitching for unusual migrating birds. That was quite exciting, but it was also so lovely to see the islands in flower in May. We are already pretty certain that we will be visiting again someday soon.

I would like to introduce you to a handsome friend of mine:

He is one of the pair of foxes who are waiting each evening for me as I put out some peanuts. A fortnight ago I finished treating them both for mange with a six-week course of arsen sulphur sprinkled onto sandwiches.

Here he is on 29th March:

And how completely and utterly pleasing it is to see him now:

The vixen’s mange was a lot worse than his but she is also much shyer and I have not been able to have a good look at her recently. However, as far as I can tell, she hasn’t deteriorated further in the last few weeks so I am hoping that she too is getting better. It is especially important to have been able to help them because they have cubs this spring.

Sadly this is not how I wanted to see my first fox cub of the year, lying cold and stiff in the meadows one morning with no obvious sign of what the problem was:

The badgers are also waiting out in the open for the peanuts at the moment, but only when they don’t realise that I’ve arrived. As soon as they get any indication that I am there with them, they shoot away into the undergrowth:

It’s good to be able to get photos of them on my camera though.

On Friday evening we met up with a couple of fellow volunteer wildlife team members and attempted to do a bat survey of Walmer Castle grounds:

We certainly heard a lot of bats on our Magenta bat detectors and saw quite a few too, especially over the Queen Mother’s pond, but we struggled to identify individual species with our basic equipment. There were a good many bats of several species feeding in the castle grounds but we currently cannot say more than that!

But the highlight of the evening was not bat-related at all. Dave spotted a tawny owl nest with two fluffy chicks in a tree hole:

We got home at around 10pm and one last check of the swift box cameras before bed revealed that a swift had returned and was spending the night in the box:

The swift looking out of the box early the next morning:

However, the swift then left the box and has not yet returned. It was just a single parent that successfully reared two chicks to fledging in this box last summer, so maybe this bird has now had to go off to find a new partner. It will be interesting to see how our infant swift colony does this year, but it doesn’t seem to be getting off to a very strong start.

Elsewhere in the meadows, it is always good to see a kestrel:

And broad-bodied chaser dragonflies are now on the wing:

We have actually had a bit of a batty week because there was a nice photo of a brown long-eared bat over in the wood:

Following the successful ringing of four tawny owl chicks in that same owl box last week, the young birds have now begun to appear on the camera:

When John removed the chicks from the box last week in order to ring them, he took a photo of the inside of the box. We had completely cleared this box out in mid February, but there has been a lot going on in there since then. The floor certainly tells that story:

The adult owls have been working really hard keeping their four chicks so well fed and deserve a bit of a rest and a drink by this shallow pool:

I don’t know where the buzzards are nesting this year – certainly not in our wood, but there is a large area of woodland in the vicinity with substantial mature trees that would suit them:

It was again a group of four of us that went round the dormouse boxes for May’s monitoring tour. John the bird ringer is interested in all the blue tit chicks that are being reared in both the dormice boxes and the bird boxes in the wood this spring. He is trying to ring as many of them as he can and then, when he puts his nets up later on in the year, he will be curious to see what percentage of the young blue tits he catches have fledged from the boxes.

Fourteen of the thirty boxes have had blue tits nesting in them this spring. Of these, three of the nests have failed:

This time four of the boxes contained young blue tits of the right size and he ringed thirty-nine chicks.

We also found eleven dormice on this month’s tour:

The highlight was definitely box 12 which contained three torpid dormice all cuddled in together:

Very sweet indeed.

I was in Maidenhead for a few days recently, and have a lovely routine when there of visiting Spade Oak nature reserve near Marlow with a friend to see what’s about. This time we saw several families of Canada geese. The posture of the adult geese when swimming with their chicks was interesting:

Canada geese often lower their necks and flatten their bodies against the water when swimming with their chicks and apparently this behaviour is called either ‘alligatoring’ or ‘stealth mode’.

It is suggested that it is both to look aggressive, warning potential predators to stay away, and perhaps also as camouflage to try to avoid attention whilst moving their goslings across the water – although I do not find this second explanation very convincing.

It has been a busy few weeks and I see that we are already nearly half way through May. Whilst every month has something to offer, it is May in particular when I would like to slow time down and fully savour every day. But there are still over two weeks of it to go and I will try to make the most of them…

Something rather special has been going on in the wood this spring because a pair of tawny owls have chosen to nest in one of the owl boxes:

For several weeks now the male owl has been bringing prey to the box by night. The incoming rodents are mostly carried in the bird’s beak, leaving his feet free to land on the box:

Although sometimes he carries them in his talons instead:

Whilst the two rodents above are mice, the photos below are of a vole and a rat that are also being caught:

And no doubt dormice as well but it’s hard to tell in the dark. It is asking a lot of the male to catch enough prey to feed his entire family.

These night time arrivals were going on throughout the 28-30 days that the female was incubating the eggs, and are carrying on still to feed both the chicks and the female since she continues to spend much time in the box. This week, though, there has been a big change in behaviour because she is now sitting for long periods in the entrance to the box. Mostly awake…

..but sometimes asleep:

Her eyes are the deep, black pools of a nocturnal animal:

I have been reporting what has been going on at the box to John, the bird ringer, who will be acting under licence to ring the chicks. He has also taken advice from experts who regularly ring tawny owls here in East Kent. As a result of all this information, the decision was taken to look in the box this afternoon:

The normal number of chicks for tawny owls is two or three and so it was very surprising to find four chicks in the box. Thankfully there was no adult in the box, but there was one watching on from not far away.

By the next post I should have a bit more detail on the chicks. Once John had returned them to their box, he took a photo of them snuggled back together – there’s not much room in there:

Elsewhere in the wood, I am really pleased to see that the green woodpeckers have decided to nest in the same hole that they have used for the previous two years. It is only about a metre and a half off the ground and easy to get a camera on:

Last year we found numerous beautiful white helleborines in the wood:

We have been looking for them again this year but have only found a couple of small sprouts, nothing like the tremendous display of last year. We did, however, stumble upon a previously-undiscovered second patch of common twayblades, another type of orchid:

It is buttercup time in the meadows. We love this time of year when our shoes are yellow with buttercup pollen as we come in from the meadows:

There are over thirty different species and hybrids of buttercup to be found growing in the UK. The great swathes of buttercup that flower here in early May, particularly where the grasses are cut shorter, are all bulbous buttercups, Ranunculus bulbosus. These grow from a swollen underground corm that gives them some drought resilience, useful because they are found in dry chalk and limestone grasslands such as the meadows.

The taller meadow buttercups, Ranunculus acris, are now just starting to appear along the hedgerow edges as well.

Small copper on a bulbous buttercup:

Meanwhile vast numbers of oxeye daisies are waiting in the wings to have their moment of glory shortly.

We have had some rain, an event so rare of late that I feel obliged to mention it. As the first few plump drops fell after such a dry spring, a frog appeared seemingly from nowhere:

Having the soil softened by rain is really good news for the birds and badgers who need to get at the worms to feed their young.

It has been some time since I’ve seen all three badger cubs together and I fear that we might already have lost one of them:

The daily peanut feeding time remains a very popular event, eagerly anticipated by the badgers, foxes and unfortunately also by the magpies:

And here is a magpie with another of the slow worms. However, slow worms can shed their tails to distract predators and, happily, it looks like this might just be the tail of the reptile:

There is something very interesting going on in one of the bushes in the meadows. A rare wasp, Polistes biglumis, has made a nest in some wild privet. Rather unimaginatively, we are calling her Big Pol and have been keeping an eye on her to see how she is getting on. This species is usually to be found in high-altitude meadows in the Alps and Apennines but, in 2020, several individuals were found nectaring on flowers at Samphire Hoe Country Park just down the coast. But, so far as we can tell, this may be the first time that a Polistes biglumis nest has been found in this country:

A scientific paper was written in 2020, following the discovery of this species at Samphire Hoe. The authors speculated that a mated female may have been carried from the Alps on a tourist car arriving at Dover. This car’s first stop was then the country park for the occupants to have a walk around after their long journey

Big Pol spends a lot of time guarding her nest but, when she was away, I was able to take a macro photo into it, showing that a single egg has been laid in each cell:

These eggs will hatch into larvae in due course and Big Pol will feed them with chewed insect meat, particularly caterpillars. Then, when the larvae become adults, they will switch to feeding on nectar.

Small blue butterflies have arrived in the meadows:

Wall butterflies seem to be having a jolly good year here and there are many more around than normal. Here is a mating pair

There are also lots of these small but silly moths fluttering along the hedges this year. I say they are silly because the males really can’t fly very well with those ridiculously long antennae:

All across the country swifts are now arriving back at their breeding sites after their long journey up from Africa. Our boxes, however, remain resolutely empty:

As I anxiously check the cameras several times a day, I remember myself as a parent of teenage children, trying not to fret as I awaited their return from a Friday night out. Well, my children always rolled home eventually and I do hope the swifts will too.