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.