It has been tremendously dry this summer and most things here have turned yellow. The Agapanthus, sitting at the threshold between the garden and the meadows, is a notable exception. A native of South Africa, it takes this sort of thing in its stride:

The wild pond totally dried up whilst we were on holiday and we weren’t here to take the extreme decision to top it up with tap water. This pond was dug in 2016 and had not dried out completely before:

The hard, dry ground makes life terribly difficult for badgers, for whom worms would ordinarily be 70% of their diet. This photo was taken just as we were leaving for the Outer Hebrides when the grass was still green, but I’m pleased to report that these four adult badgers and at least one of the cubs are still alive:

It was very busy along Walmer seafront last week as the Downs Sailing Club hosted the National Schools Sailing Regatta for the first time in twelve years. How lovely to see the waters in front of the meadows so alive with young people enjoying this wholesome activity:

As we were admiring all the dinghies one morning, ten small planes flew over our heads in formation. It was the Swiss Airforce aerial display team flying their Pilatus PC-7 aircraft up to an airshow at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire:

I am pleased to see that, even in this prolonged dry weather when worms and other soil-dwelling invertebrates must be so hard to come by, blackbird chicks are still successfully fledging:

Song thrushes have learned to switch to snails when worms are not available:

Just below the gate is a snail graveyard with hundreds of shells:

A wren has taken to spreading all its feathers out and sunbathing on this perch:

And a great spotted woodpecker is an unusual sight here in the meadows:

We are no longer seeing the complete kestrel family that had previously been hanging out on our roof, although one or two of them are still calling by:

The ringed female is looking a bit tatty after all the hard work of bringing up her family:

It’s always exciting to see owls in the meadows:

This year two pairs of swifts nested in the swift boxes attached to the side of the house. One of these pairs built a nest but then didn’t lay any eggs, and they have now already left on their migration back to Africa. Hopefully they will return next year to breed.

For a long time it looked like the other pair were also not going to lay any eggs but they finally did, a month later than in the previous two years. There are now two feathered chicks in the box doing well:

The many great green bush-crickets that live amongst the meadow grasses are a tasty snack for the birds:

When I run the moth trap, I try to get to it the next morning whilst it is still dark and before the birds get up. Any moths that haven’t quite made it into the shelter of the trap are vulnerable to being picked off by magpies once it gets light and I feel responsible for their safety. This week I got up at 3am and went out to the trap to turn off the light and pot up any exposed moths.

I was shocked to see a forlorn collection of wings already scattered around in the base of the trap and a great green bush-cricket sitting at the entrance, grabbing moths as they arrived. I managed to catch her and get her into a large jar:

Later the same morning I released her back into the meadows and took a better photo before she jumped away:

The hummingbird hawk-moth is mainly an immigrant to this country from southern Europe and north Africa, although for several years now some have also been surviving our winters and breeding in southern England:

On the other hand, it is far from normal to see clearwing moths. Even though there are probably quite a lot of them around, they manage to keep themselves well under the human radar. This week I put pheromone lures out and caught two additional clearwing moth species. The six-belted clearwing was caught in the meadows amongst birds-foot trefoil, one of its larval foodplants:

And two red-belted clearwing were caught close to a hawthorn tree in the wood:

I have now seen six of the fourteen clearwing species resident in the British Isles. The others that I have spotted, clockwise from top left, are the orange-tailed clearwing, currant clearwing, red-tipped clearwing and the fiery clearwing:

What wonderful things they are.

I feel that hoverflies are generally underappreciated and ill-understood by many people, myself included. As well as the adults being excellent pollinators, the larvae of around 40% of British species are gardeners’ friends, being important predators of aphids.

There has been recent evidence that hoverflies are in steep decline across Great Britain and, given their significance in the ecosystem, I find it amazing that the larvae of only about two thirds of UK hoverfly species have even been described, let alone their lifecycle properly understood.

There are around 280 species of hoverfly in the UK. The larvae of about 20% of these are aquatic or semi-aquatic, living in shallow water, mud or tree rot holes. Another 40% are predatory, eating aphids and other small terrestrial invertebrates. The final 40% of hoverfly larvae live in decaying wood, plant roots, dung or within wasp, bee or ant nests. It feels important to fully get to grips with these lifecycles in order to know how best to conserve them.

I have been admiring two different species of hoverfly this week. This first one is a bit of a corker:

More is known about life cycle of this second hoverfly. It is the great pied hoverfly, Volucella pellucens, which always reminds me of Humpty Dumpty. The adult female lays her eggs in social wasp nests and the hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest.

What is not fully comprehended, though, is how the female hoverfly can successfully sneak undetected into the well-guarded wasp nest.

Over in the wood, the large marjoram clearing has come into glorious flower:

The blossoming marjoram is heaving with invertebrates including many species of butterfly. The silver-washed fritillary is the most magnificent of them all and photos really don’t do them justice. We saw several of these this week:

June’s tour around the dormouse boxes ended up not happening because the only day that we could do was one of the amber heat warning days which would have been madness. So this week we set off on the July tour, with the boxes not having been opened for two months. We had Lottie and Gemma with us, both of whom hope to get their dormouse disturbance licences soon, but need some more experience handling dormice first.

Unfortunately, although we had found eleven dormice on May’s tour, this time we only found three. We speculated that it has been too hot in the boxes and the dormice are making wild nests in more airy places.

The lid of box 29 was firmly stuck down and Dave ended up having to lever it off with a knife. We were all surprised with what we found in there:

My notes from the May tour told me that angry buzzing had been coming from this box and we had wisely decided not to open it. That must have been a tree bumblebee nest because now in the box in July is the nest of the wax moth, Aphomia sociella, whose caterpillars consume the wax, pollen and bee larvae of tree bumblebees. All very interesting.

Other photos from the wood this week:

I finish today with some wildlife sightings from our children. Jonty found a leafcutter bee struggling with an enormous piece of leaf in his greenhouse in Maidenhead. The bee will be using the leaf to make a series of chambers within a tunnel. As she completes each leaf-lined chamber she will stock it with a pile of pollen and lay an egg on it. The resulting larva will live off the pollen that its mother provided for it.

Our other son Jonny and his wife Hayley have been in Madagascar this week and have been sending us photos of many different lemur species and all sorts of other bizarre but wonderful things. This comet moth, Argema mittrei, is gigantic and is endemic to the Madagascan rainforests. The males have a wingspan of 20cm making it one of the largest moths in the World. Here is one clinging to its pupal cocoon:

But the photo below is the most extraordinary of them all to my mind:

It appears to just be a photo of some branches, yet lying along the length of the central branch is a leaf gecko, its head pointing downwards, and with its tail towards the top of the photo. Apparently their nature guide spotted this animal from about five metres away. How amazing is that!

This week we escaped the heat and have been enjoying the much cooler climate of the Outer Hebrides.

The archipelago has nineteen inhabited islands but we spent the week investigating the wildlife on just five of them that are linked together by causeways: Berneray, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay:

The western margins of the islands are covered in glorious machair, low lying coastal grassland growing on windblown shell sand. It is one of the rarest habitats in Europe, famous for its plant variety and vitally important for bird populations.

The 2022 population census recorded just 1,574 permanent residents on North Uist. Only 300 of these live in the capital, Lochmaddy, and the rest are spread out across the island in extremely low density:

Every day of the holiday we visited wonderful beaches that we mostly had entirely to ourselves:

The Outer Hebrides are almost entirely off the main gas grid and rely heavily on tankered oil, and so peat remains an important supplementary fuel to reduce heating costs for the households. However, the tradition of peat cutting is slowly declining as the generation that knows how to cut and stack peat passes on. Additionally, since peatlands sequester carbon, strict regulations are now in place in an attempt to ensure sustainable harvesting:

There were very few hotels and restaurants on the islands. The food shops were nearly all smallish Co-ops, although these were quite well stocked with fruit and vegetables. Not always though:

Over a hundred and ten traditional shielings remain on North Uist, with their thatched roofs held down with boulders:

But these days the home below is much more representative of the sort of place where people live:

Although some things do still need to be held down with rocks:

On the first morning of our stay we were booked onto a boat trip from Kallin Harbour, taking us out into the waters around the uninhabited island of Ronay. We saw at least six white-tailed sea eagles:

The eagles have learnt that it is often worth their while following fishing boats, as well as wildlife boats such as ours, where a single fish was inflated with air and put into the water:

A white-tailed eagle is often referred to as a ‘flying barn door’:

We also saw several golden eagles on the boat trip. The breeding female golden eagle on this territory was lost last year but a new female has now arrived. They didn’t nest this year but there are great hopes that they will breed next year.

The rest of the week was spent travelling around the islands in the minibus seeing what wildlife we could find.

We also saw hen harriers every day. This female was just about to catch a vole:

Red throated, black throated and great northern divers were seen over the course of the week:

By the end of the week we had ninety species on our bird list which is not an enormous total but there were some very good things on it! For the first time ever Dave and I heard corncrakes singing, as they start their second broods, which is something we had always wanted to do.

It wasn’t just birds that we saw:

On one of the beaches several species of jellyfish had washed up. Blue, compass and moon jellyfish here:

I was delighted with my first ever sighting of a large heath butterfly. This is the virtually spotless scotica race of the butterfly which is only found in northern Scotland

I had also never seen this moth before. It’s a true lovers knot, a heathland specialist with its larvae feeding on heathers:

This common hawker was a new species of dragonfly for me:

The islands are a stronghold for rare bumblebees including the great yellow bumblebee and the moss carder bee that feed on the flower-rich machair:

On our last day we were driving to a beach but had to abandon the minibus because the track was flooded:

We continued of foot but when we crested the dunes to look down onto the beach, we found to our surprise that we were not alone:

The Highland cattle were milling around enjoying themselves in the shallows and on the sand.

It was a wonderfully atmospheric sight and we sat for ages watching them all in the sunshine. It will remain in our memories as one of the highlights of the trip.

The last stop to finish up our final day was at the ancient stone circle overlooking Langass Loch – a very photogenic spot indeed:

At 6am the next morning we left our hotel and began our long journey home, this time travelling on the Caledonian overnight sleeper train down from Inverness, arriving shattered but happy towards lunchtime the next day. We might only be a small nation, but the Outer Hebrides to the east coast of Kent still seemed a very long way indeed.

We had always hoped to one day be able to experience what life is like in the remote Outer Hebrides. We probably saw them at their best this week, when they were in flower and in such lovely weather, and we were delighted to have finally got ourselves there.

On a warm, still summer’s evening this week we went on a trip up the Stour to see if we could spot any of the two hundred beavers that are now thought to be living on the fifteen miles of river between Canterbury and Sandwich.

We started at 8pm alongside the Grove Ferry Inn at point A on the map below and travelled south-west where the lovely river has Stodmarsh nature reserve to the south and the railway line running alongside it to the north:

At point B, the tidal influence stopped and the waters became beautifully clear thereafter. We turned around at point C and headed back to Grove Ferry, arriving back in the dark around 10.30pm

The beavers don’t attempt to dam the river but instead live in lodges and burrows along its banks and have also expanded out into the marshy Stodmarsh reserve. We passed four or five beaver lodges as we progressed up the river:

The animals would much rather swim than travel by foot, so they dig canals along their favoured routes away from the river. This is an entrance to one of these canals which apparently stretches for 15 metres:

There is concern about what this concentration of beavers, with all their burrow and canal building, will have on the integrity of the river banks and railway embankment, so cameras have been placed at strategic points to monitor their activity:

We did see around twelve beavers over the course of the trip, although mostly as the light was fading fast and photography was difficult. The best sighting was at the point where we turned the boat around. A willow had fallen into the water there and three or four beavers were out working to strip its bark:

In the photo below a beaver is facing us, just below the slanting trunk and I like its large, black nose:

It is so very wonderful to see wild beavers flourishing in Britain once more after they were hunted to extinction in the 16th century. So much more is now understood about the role this species can play in protecting the country against flooding and increasing our depleted biodiversity, and I hope that the sheer number of the animals living on the Stour doesn’t create problems and earn them a bad reputation.

The ringed female kestrel, who has been with us here for the last seven years, has been bringing her three offspring up to the meadows every day recently. We know when they have arrived because they make quite a racket that is impossible to miss. The young birds are often parked in a Scots pine close to the house:

Or they are to be found hanging out amongst the chimney pots:

Unfortunately, up to 70% of kestrels die in their first year, many starving because of their inexperience in hunting for their food, so I hope these young birds are paying attention to what their mother is now teaching them.

It is the first time that we have been treated to views of a family group of kestrels here.

I have some giants to show you this week. The first is the privet hawk-month, a monster with a wingspan of up to 12cm:

The second giant is a loud and aggressive horsefly that I found in the kitchen. Because we have no livestock or deer nearby, sightings of horseflies are mercifully rare. This Tabanus species was about 2cm long, though, and I was very pleased to remove it from the house:

Whilst the horsefly would happily bite humans, the hornet-mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, in the next photo, poses no threat to us despite being a scary 2cm long. It lays its eggs in wasp nests and its larvae feed mainly on the detritus at the bottom of the nest:

This photo below, taken in the meadows in August 2018, shows a wasp nest that had been torn open by badgers overnight, leaving everything in disarray. However, a Volucella zonaria has arrived and can be seen inspecting the carnage to see if it presented an opportunity for her to lay her eggs:

My final monster for today is a violet carpenter bee that our daughter Lizzie saw in Provence, where she is staying in a chateau with a lovely garden this weekend to attend a wedding:

These bees can apparently be up to 3cm long, which is enormous for a bee, and have a jet black body with amazing iridescent violet-blue wings. Although it is primarily a southern European species, it has now arrived in England and was first spotted breeding here in 2007. It remains very rare here, though, and I have certainly never seen one. They bore into soft, decaying, untreated wood to make their nest and then provision it with pollen collected from flowering plants.

The running of the moth trap is quite an undertaking at this time of year because the catches are so large, and I’m so slow working my way through them. Nevertheless, I am trying to get round to it once a week as I attempt to build up a comprehensive moth list for the meadows. The meadow moth list, only started last year, currently stands at 220 macro moth species and 97 micro moths.

The Sussex emerald is a highly restricted, endangered moth in the UK but the area of shingle below the meadows is one of the places that it does still breed and I feel privileged to get them in the moth trap each year:

The bright wave is another threatened and red data book species that breeds on the vegetated shingle below us, and I catch this moth too at this time of year:

The small blue is the UK’s smallest butterfly and we are lucky to have a colony of them here. This species is highly localised and scarce, mainly because they rely on only one plant, the kidney vetch, to feed their caterpillars. It also doesn’t help, of course, that kidney vetch is only a short-lived perennial. By this time of year, the first brood of adults, flying from mid-May to mid-June, have laid their eggs and these have now developed into caterpillars living within the fading flowers. When I went out looking for small blue caterpillars this week, it didn’t take me very long to find some:

The beginning of July is when ragwort starts announcing itself by coming into flower, and we start remorselessly pulling it up. This huge ragwort plant was hiding in plain sight in the reptile area:

We don’t feel bad about removing ragwort, even though it is good for pollinators, because there is vast amount of it growing locally. It is classified as an injurious weed in the Weeds Act of 1959 and causes irreversible liver damage in grazing animals. Our cut grasses no longer go to make hay but we just don’t want it here anyway, because it is highly vigorous and doesn’t stay in balance with the rest of the plants in the meadow community. If, however, there are cinnabar moth caterpillars on the plant, then we leave it alone, returning later to pull it once the caterpillars have safely pupated into the ground below the plant:

We spent a morning this week in the wood with John the bird ringer, who is progressing the breeding bird survey that he has been carrying out in the wood this spring for the British Trust for Ornithology. A fortnight previously he had checked the raptor boxes and found a stock dove nest with eggs in one of the tawny boxes:

A stock dove had flown from the box as we were putting the ladder up and inside there were two warm eggs, along with a third one that wasn’t being incubated:

We returned this week in the hope that there were now chicks in the box that were the right size for ringing. At this stage the chicks bear little relation to the adult birds that they will grow up to be:

What an extraordinary beak they have. It is broad and black, still with the grey egg tooth at the tip. This egg tooth is a temporary, sharp projection on the upper bill which is used to puncture the inner air cell of the egg for the chick’s initial breaths, and then used to break open the eggshell from the inside.

The beak of an adult bird looks very different indeed:

Both chicks were very well fed and had large, prominent crops that were full of the crop milk being fed to them by both of their parents. The crop milk is highly nutritious but also very liquid and John had to be very careful that the young birds stayed the right way up as he got them down from the box to ring. This is because there is a risk of them drowning in the crop milk should they turn upside down.

He also looked in the tawny nest box that four tawny owl chicks had fledged from back in May. The trail camera looking at the box showed that stock doves had moved in almost as soon as the owls moved out:

When John got the tawny owl chicks out of the box to ring them shortly before they fledged, he took a photo of the floor of the box. We had completely cleaned it out over the winter, but the owls had made quite a mess:

He took another photo of the inside of the box this week:

The stock doves have clearly been busy bringing in lots of twigs and I expect that they will lay some eggs shortly.

Other photos from the wood this week:

This weekend an inspirational home in Deal held its annual open day to mark Swift Awareness Week:

This semi-detached house has 28 swift boxes under the eaves of the roof and, this year, will potentially have thirty chicks fledging from the colony:

There is much to be enjoyed about this plan of the boxes. Interestingly, the boxes facing north-east are by far the least popular with numbers 11 to 18 currently sitting empty. Our boxes here in the meadows all face north, other than one that looks east, and we had thought that this is the recommended aspect so that the boxes don’t get too hot – but this throws that advice into doubt.

New this year is box 19 which is above the conservatory and difficult to access. Therefore the owner, Dan, drilled out from the loft space and the box behind this entrance hole sits in the attic. He said, however, that he had been planning to put three of these in but it proved so difficult to install that there is only one so far. There are already swifts breeding in this box, though, so the concept is good.

We enjoyed seeing a lot of swift comings and goings while we stood in the garden:

It was great to catch up with what is going on in Dan’s swift colony and I got a chance to ask him about our swift pair here, where an egg wasn’t laid until 22nd June, a month later than in the previous two years. He reassuringly told us that his latest egg ever was laid on 21st September and that all ended successfully with the birds setting off on their migration at the very end of October.

So my final photo for today is of the inside of our swift box here where incubation is doggedly continuing:

Hatching is expected on 12th to 15th July.