With August now drawing to a close and schools soon going back, there is a feeling that we are inexorably sliding into autumn.

The two swift chicks that were being raised in a nest box attached to the house have now fledged, and the family should already be well on its way across Europe:

The front lawn has once more been declared out of bounds as delicate autumn lady’s-tresses push their heads up above the soil:

And the ivy bee is the final solitary bee to emerge, timed to coincide with the ivy coming into flower at this time of year:

Wasp spiders are now out in force amongst the meadow grasses, hoping for grasshoppers and crickets to make that fatal error of judgement and end up in their webs:

Badgers have started dragging dry grasses down underground to prepare their living quarters for the coming winter:

There have been some major excavations around the sett as renovations are carried out underground:

The autumn bird migration is now well underway. The cuckoos and swifts have already gone and many more species are starting to follow them. This wheatear below is a new species for the meadows – number 104 – but it’s a shame that the trail camera didn’t get it properly into focus:

John, the bird ringer, has had his nets up in the meadows twice recently and caught some of these migrants as they make their way south. This whitethroat was born this year:.

He also caught some birds that will probably be staying around here this winter. This was one of four young wrens that he has ringed this week:

And this great tit also hatched this year:

It is a very sad fact that this greenfinch below, caught on a trail camera this week, is the first greenfinch that I have seen in either the meadows or the wood for a very long time:

Very soon now the annual cut of the meadows will be getting underway and Dave will be hoping to get the job done before the autumn storms set in. This will inevitably expose small mammals that have, up until now, been safely hidden amongst the long grasses, and usually means that some exciting birds of prey will turn up. The kestrels, though, have been hunting here even before Dave gets going on the tractor:

And the barn owl has been patrolling at night, although this is the best photo I have of it this time:

This week I went along to a family mothing event at Led by the Wild, a not-for-profit community interest company situated halfway between Ashford and Hythe, which manages its thirty acres of land for wildlife, as well as holding events and nature projects. I have to say that I found it all terribly inspirational.

I was with our daughter Sally and her family, and we will now be keeping an eye out for future events being held.

There have been a lot of hummingbird hawk-moths around Kent this summer. They are still mainly migrants to this country, arriving here from southern Europe and northern Africa. They do then breed here over the summer, laying their eggs on plants of the bedstraw family, and these UK-born moths boost numbers towards the end of the summer. There is evidence that they are also occasionally able to survive our winters, although this appears to be the exception rather than the rule:

There aren’t any horse chestnut trees in the meadows and only a couple of them in the wood. These days horse chestnuts look like they are dying back for autumn way ahead of time because of heavy infestations of the horse chestnut leaf miner moth, Cameraria ohridella

This moth was first recorded in Wimbledon in 2002 and has rapidly spread across England and Wales and continues to reach further west and north every year

Several of the adult moths were to be seen resting under the leaves:

It is a small moth whose larvae live in mines within the horse chestnut leaves and, in hot summers such as this one, there can be as many as five generations of the moth a year. They do not kill the tree, but they surely reduce its vigour as, year after year, the leaves will not be producing as much food for the tree as they would otherwise be doing. Much work has been going on in the background to try to find a good way to control these moths and a number of natural predators have been observed. Blue tits, great tits and marsh tits do feed on the larvae within the leaf but, between them, they apparently only take 2-4% of the moth larvae and another solution is still needed.

Elsewhere in the wood, some of the lime trees have nail galls on their leaves:

They are caused by the gall mite Eriophyes tiliae. Each gall is around a centimetre long and is full of tiny pale hairs among which the mites feed. A hole on the underside of the leaf allows the mites to escape in the autumn before the leaf falls. They move to crevices in the bark, especially around the bases of the buds, where they overwinter before making their way to the young leaves in the spring.

I ran the moth trap in the wood for the first time since April. However, I once more had the problem that I have had before in the wood – the moths were too warm and active and immediately flew away as I opened the trap. When I run the trap in the meadows, I have some really cool, deep shade that I can put the trap into for a while before opening it, meaning that the moths then largely stay put. I suppose that one solution would be to return to the wood very early the next morning before the day warms up, and perhaps I will try that next time.

Although most of the moths flew away before I could look at them, I did find several of these fork-palped harvestmen, Dicranopalpus ramosus, in the trap:

Adults can be found in the late summer and they have really long legs – the second pair can each be as much as 5cm in length:

They are omnivorous scavengers, eating a varied diet of small insects, dead organic matter and fungi and algae. Unlike spiders, they do not have venom or silk glands but instead use those forked pedipalps and leg hooks to catch food and tear it into chunks. The species originated in Morocco but has been spreading out from there for some time. It reached the UK in Bournemouth in 1957 and reached Scotland in 2000.

The Walmer Castle wildlife team had a day out to the wood to accompany Dave and me on our August tour around the dormouse boxes. It seems that the number of dormice being found in nest boxes across Kent has been down in the heat of the summer, so I was pleased that we did find three dormice this time to show the team:

We might be slowly stepping into autumn here in the UK, but at the very tip of South America, Argentina is just beginning to anticipate the coming of spring. Our son Jonny and his wife are holidaying there and sent us this photo of a Chimango caracara sitting on the fence with a very daunting backdrop indeed:

We have been reading that the high temperatures around Europe this summer have led to many people choosing to ‘coolcation’ in more northerly climes. But this is taking coolcationing to the extreme and we are looking forward to hearing how they got on.

The notorious Goodwin Sands lie about six miles off the coast of Deal. Historically nicknamed ‘the great ship swallower’, it is a dangerous ten-mile long sandbank where around 2,000 ships have been wrecked over the centuries.

Due to the dangers, the area was guarded by five lightships in the 19th century. Of these, the South Goodwin Lightvessel had a particularly turbulent history. It was bombed and sunk by the Germans in the Second World War and then, in 1954, its replacement suffered a terrible tragedy. On the night of 26th November, the cables to her two anchors broke in a hurricane-force storm and she was wrecked, killing seven of the eight people on board. The one survivor, who was rescued the next morning having clung to the rigging in raging seas for nine hours, had only been visiting the vessel to record bird migration.

The South Goodwin Lightship has now been replaced by a light buoy. In fact, until this week, the East Goodwin Lightship was the only remaining lightship of the five that once guarded the sands, all the others having been changed to light buoys over the years. She was such an iconic sight, and one that was easily visible from the meadows through binoculars. We got a closer look at her when we took a boat trip out to the Goodwins to have a walk on the sands back in 2024:

Below is a better photo of her, taken in Harwich in 2004, presumably when she was on her way out to the sands to replace an earlier model:

The safety of shipping and the well-being of seafarers have been the primary concerns of Trinity House since being incorporated by Royal Charter in 1514. Their two ships, the Patricia and the Galatea, are responsible for maintaining the navigational aids around the entire coastlines of England and Wales and the Channel Islands.

Because of the number of these navigational aids around the Goodwin Sands, one or other of these ships is often anchored overnight alongside the meadows. But it was completely unprecedented that both of them were here, as they were one night this week:

Later on that morning, we saw them working together further out to sea:

It was a couple of days after this that Dave was sitting at the top of the meadows with his birding scope, hoping to point the East Goodwin Lightship out to some visitors. He was very confused indeed when it seemed to have completely disappeared.

He researched this on returning inside and discovered that the East Goodwin Lightship had just been retired and towed back to Harwich by the Patricia. She has now been replaced by a light buoy which will be much easier to maintain. We presume that this happened on the day that both ships were working here together.

If there are any plans for what is now to happen to the East Goodwin Lightship, we cannot find any reference to them. A list of British Lightvessels on Wikipedia shows that some have become photographic studios, social spaces for yacht clubs, and floating art galleries and museums after they retired. Back in 2023 we stayed at Tollesbury in Essex where LV15 rests her old bones. She retired in the late 80s and was bought by the Fellowship Afloat Charitable Trust who provide outdoor activities for kids who sleep onboard the lightvessel, which must be very memorable for them.

Things change and technology marches on, but we will certainly miss that big, red lightship that was always there on duty out to sea.

This week the full-scale replica of the Nao Victoria sailed into Dover and we went to take a look at her. The Nao Victoria was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. It was one of five ships that left Seville in 1519 to try to find a good route to the spice islands, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. But after three years at sea, four of the ships had been lost and it was only the Nao Victoria that returned to Spain, having successfully sailed around the entire world.

A full scale replica of the ship was built in 1991 and, between 2004 and 2006, she repeated the journey of the original ship.

This summer she is visiting Dover for ten days and I have to say that she looked really small and such an odd sight moored up at the modern docks:

Whilst we were in Dover to see the Nao Victoria, we also went for a drink in one of Dover’s oldest pubs, The White Horse Inn, in a building which dates back to 1365:

But it wasn’t its great age that brought us there because it is famous for being the Channel swimmers’ pub. For decades, successful Channel swimmers have come to the pub after their swim to sign the walls and ceilings with their name and the date and timing of their swim.

You have to be in awe of Nora of Mexico who seems to have swum the Channel nine times, including a solo swim in 1994 when she swam from England to France and then back to England again in 23 hours 38 minutes:

I have driven past this pub so many times and now at last we have gone in.

The big news in the meadows is that we have finally had some rain! The drought eventually broke a week ago with some overnight rain and, in the refreshing cool of the next morning, I took this shocking photo from my bedroom window as a record of how dry the summer of 2026 has been:

Hopefully we will now start to see some green returning to this view.

With the breeding season over, John, the bird ringer, can once more play bird calls at his nets. The warblers are already on the move and he caught this young reed warbler in the meadows this week:

And he was cross not to have had his nets up when this pied flycatcher called in for a drink this week en route for Africa:

The blackbirds have started on the sloes:

And this is a rather spectacular photo of a magpie:

I am pleased that a barn owl has been hunting in the meadows most nights recently:

And the trail camera took this photo just at the moment that a stock dove lost a feather:

The two young swifts in the nest box attached to the house are continuing to grow well and spend a lot of their day peering out of the box to await the return of their parents:

It is funny to see the little family at night when the four of them attempt to cram themselves into the small feather nest:

It won’t be long now until they are gone.

My last photo for today is of a curious young fox who peered down at our daughter Lizzie and her partner through their kitchen roof-light in Walthamstow one morning:

I think it gave them quite a shock.

I would like to finish by dedicating this post to my aunt Rhona, whose funeral we went to this week in Cardiff. She was a wonderful lady who very much liked to travel the seas herself. She had a long and happy life and was a big supporter of this blog.

This week we returned for a few days to Curry Farm, a 65 acre private nature reserve near Bradwell-on-Sea on the Blackwater estuary in Essex:

Stephen Dewick and his wife Jean live at Curry farm today but it was Stephen’s late father who bought the farm back in 1932 and apples and then cereals were grown there until the early 1990s. Now, however, the land is totally given over to wildlife conservation. Stephen, like his father before him, has been extremely interested in macro moths his entire life and, incredibly, a moth trap has been run at Curry Farm on an almost nightly basis since 1946

But it is a moth trap like no other that I have seen before. It is apparently the largest moth trap in the country – a walk-in building with soil banked up around it to keep it cool and a 400 watt metal halide bulb shining on its roof to bring the moths in.

There is a funnel below the bulb into which the moths tumble, eventually ending up in the room below:

As it gets dark the next evening, the moths are allowed to escape for a couple of hours before the door is once more shut and the light on the roof goes back on as the next night’s mothing commences.

Stephen’s father, Bob Dewick, is famous in mothing circles because, in 1951, he discovered a species at Curry Farm that was new to Britain. The moth was given the common name Dewick’s plusia in his honour. After its discovery, the moth remained a very rare immigrant for many years, but has now started breeding in this country and numbers have increased significantly.

I had never seen a Dewick’s plusia before, but this week | saw four of them in the walk-in trap one morning. How very fitting to have seen my first Dewick’s plusia whilst standing next to a Dewick.

All the photos taken in the moth trap come out very orange because of the light in there, but here are two of the Dewick’s plusia moths that I saw this week:

Stephen catches far too many moths every day to count and report them all, so he only records rarities, interesting aberrations, first-sighting-of-the-years and migrant moths.

In this hot weather, he has already been getting lots of migrants. This is a bordered straw which doesn’t breed in this country:

And nor does the Vestal:

The eyed hawk-moth is not a migrant but I include it below because of the face, with eyes and long nose, that it flashes when threatened by a potential predator. This face been proven to deter insectivorous birds:

But, for me, the most astounding thing I saw in the trap was not a moth at all. The great silver water beetle, Hydrophilus piceus, is very large indeed, reaching a length of around 5cm. It is rare in the UK, only being found in a few places such as East Anglia and the Somerset levels. It lives in ponds and ditches but can fly to disperse and is attracted to light so does occasionally turn up in the Curry Farm moth trap:

We also saw lesser stag beetles out on the reserve, which was a new species for me as well:

On the underside of the stag beetle were some hitch-hiking mites which are harmless to the beetle and are simply clinging on so that they can be transported to new food sources:

The 65 acre reserve was looking as parched as our meadows are back home. Dave nearly trod on a large grass snake that was basking on one of the paths and apparently there are adders on the reserve as well:

We noticed quite a few wild plum trees that were dripping with ripe fruit at this time of year:

There was plenty of evidence that these plums were being eaten by the foxes:

Badgers will also be eating these plums as they drop to the ground, and we realised that this fruit must be a valuable food source for them in high summer when the ground is hard and worms are unavailable. On returning home I have immediately ordered three container-grown cherry plum trees to plant out in the meadows this coming autumn. Not only will the cherry plum be the first tree to flower each spring, providing energy-rich nectar for early bees and butterflies, they will also help to feed the badgers in late summer as they await the autumn rains.

We had a gentle few days in Essex in the high temperatures and with our elderly dog in tow, but we really enjoyed it and are planning on returning for a third visit next year.

Back in the meadows, winged ants have been taking to the air to disperse from the hundreds, if not thousands, of ant nests here. Large numbers of black-headed gulls arrive seemingly from nowhere and fly round and round trying to catch them. It is an annual spectacle that we look forward to:

The two swift chicks in the nest box attached to the side of the house are growing fast and I’m delighted to report that both parents are still in attendance:

The ringed kestrel has been a regular visitor to the meadows since 2019. Bringing up three chicks this year has taken its toll and she is definitely looking a bit ropey at the moment. But she has also now embarked on her annual moult, which will progress slowly so that she is still able to effectively hunt throughout. Before too long she should look smart once more:

She has her back to us here as she takes a cooling bath with the male:

And here is one of their young:

Many birds are now moulting following the hard work of the breeding season:

I’m pleased to see both badger cubs still going strong and are out with their mother here:

This week a badger dug a small latrine near the garden and very accurately deposited some dung in it:

They excavated a wasp nest one night to get at the combs full of protein-rich larvae. This is the best photo I got the next morning because there were still lots of very angry wasps buzzing around it and I decided not to get too close:

Over in the wood, another animal that likes to eat wasp larvae has returned to the same shallow pool:

Elsewhere in the wood a common buzzard arrives for a drink:

And I love this photo below of water cascading down from its beak:

Dave recently took this photo of two stock dove chicks that were being raised in the tawny owl nest box:

Five days later we met John, the bird ringer, at the wood so that he could ring them. It hadn’t been very long at all but they had developed so much:

The eclipse on Wednesday evening brought Dave and I out into the meadows wearing our wacky cardboard eclipse glasses:

I have now seen some fantastic images that some people managed to capture of the eclipse, and my best effort below definitely isn’t one of these. However, it is a record shot of a very memorable event

But there was a second significant event in the meadows this week when the partner of our youngest child, Lizzie, told us he wanted to have a picnic in the meadows at which he planned to propose to her. Dave and I did what we could to prepare a magical space for them, setting up the picnic at the top of the meadows with views over the Channel and across to the white cliffs of France:

There was a slight hiccup when he got down on one knee and presented her with a small box that unexpectedly turned out to be completely empty of a ring, and for this he will forever be teased. However, she said yes regardless.

We are now looking forward to a family wedding in 2027.

There was a very interesting visitor to the wood this week:

This is a male honey buzzard, birds with a specialist diet that mainly eat the protein-rich larvae of wasps, bees and hornets. They sit quietly and watch the flight patterns of the insects in order to locate their nests. Once found, they then tear the nest open with their powerful claws to access the combs of larvae. They have several evolutionary adaptations to help them cope with being stung, such as the feathers on their heads which are short and stiff and arranged like fish scales.

It is thought that there are only 130 to 150 pairs of these birds nesting in Britain and this is a shame because they are the only natural predator we have for the invasive Asian hornets that have recently arrived in this country.

As a rare breeding bird in the UK, the location of honey buzzard nests are usually swathed in great secrecy for the birds’ protection. However there was a honey buzzard nest in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex, featured on this year’s Springwatch television programme back in May. As of 3rd August, the live footage of this nest with two chicks is still being broadcast and can be viewed at ashdownforest.org/honey-buzzard-livecam/ although the chicks do now look close to fledging and will surely soon be gone. It is the first ever live streaming of a honey buzzard nest in the UK and I hope that it is being watched closely by experts and that much is being learned.

This week I have been regularly checking in wth the nest to see what is going on. Below the two chicks have just been given a large piece of honeycomb by their mother, out of which they were extracting the wasp larvae:

It is mostly honeycomb that is coming in to the nest, but in this next photo the adult male on the right has delivered a bird chick that he delicately pulled small bits off to feed to his chicks:

Blean Woods is a large area of remote woodland around Canterbury and I am now speculating that perhaps the honey buzzard seen in our wood this week has a nest somewhere there.

But the honey buzzard was not the only new species spotted in the wood. Two botanical experts were doing a survey there recently and found a broad-leaved helleborine in a clearing:

We went to where the botanists had spotted the plant and managed to find six more as well. Most of them were now bearing seed pods, indicating that they have already flowered and that those flowers were pollinated. There has been research to suggest that the flowers of this helleborine mimic the smell of green leaves that are being attacked by caterpillars. The common wasp and the German wasp are drawn to the plant, hoping to predate the non-existent caterpillars, and end up pollinating its flowers whilst they are there.

Although the flowers are greenish and somewhat inconspicuous, we are sorry to have missed them and hope that these plants will return next year.

The third and final new species to be spotted in the wood this week was crawling around on a woodpile:

This very large caterpillar grows up to 6.5cm. I put my hand in front of the caterpillar so that it crawled over it, which gives it some perspective:

This caterpillar will pupate in loose soil or leaf litter underneath the lime tree and this is how it will spend the winter. In the spring it will emerge as an adult, which also looks pretty wonderful:

This spring four tawny owl chicks were raised in a tawny owl nest box attached to a large beech tree at the edge of a clearing. John, the bird ringer, ringed them on 6th May and they all fledged a week later:

The owls had previously nested in the box in 2022 and fledged two young. But where were they nesting in the intervening years? Tawnies are generally faithful to a nest site, but perhaps ours are having to rotate between several sites within their territory because of competition with squirrels? Once a tawny owl has selected a nest site, they are able to defend it but, if the squirrels get to the box first and fill it with twigs and leaves, the box becomes unusable by the owls. Squirrels certainly did nest in the box in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Dave has decided to make a new tawny owl box along the lines of this successful one, and place it at the edge of a newly-created clearing elsewhere in the wood. We hope that this will increase the options for the owls.

While he was up at the box, he had a quick look in and found two stock dove chicks:

We have arranged to meet John at the wood in a few days for him to ring these chicks.

In this continued hot and dry weather the owls have been coming to the ponds every day and it’s so lovely to see them:

Over in the meadows, I was pleased to see this photo of both badger cubs together because I was worrying about how they were getting on in this drought:

And it’s always interesting to get an insight into what the foxes are eating. This is some kind of largish bird:

Whilst this is a rabbit:

This perch alongside the hedgerow is the only one that I ever see sparrowhawks using. They don’t like perching out in the open:

All continues well in the swift box attached to the side of the house. There are still two adults in attendance and the chicks are growing fast:

Last year we found 149 wasp spiders out in the meadows. So far this year we have only found one:

While I was out looking for wasp spiders, I did find this different species which was less than half the size but did also have a lot of yellow on her.

The clouded yellow butterfly is an immigrant to the UK and many more arrive some years than others. We hadn’t seen one at all in the meadows since 2023 but have been happy to see several here this year:

Our son Jonny and his wife are still in Madagascar and continue to send us photos of the sometimes wacky wildlife that they are seeing. This nymph of the flatid leaf bug, Phromnia rosea, is endemic to the tropical dry forests of Madagascar and looks really quite extraordinary:

The adult bugs have wide pink wings which they hold in a tent like fashion, concealing the body. Thus, when they group together, they could well be mistaken for a flower spike:

What a fantastic wildlife experience they are having out there. Look closely, though, and British wildlife can be pretty amazing too.