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…