This week we sailed out of Whitstable and into the Thames estuary onboard Greta, a Thames sailing barge built in 1892:

Once we had left the harbour, we headed for the Kentish Flats windmill farm to get a better look at it. There are four windmill farms in the mouth of the Thames:

The Kentish Flats consists of 45 turbines standing on a large, shallow plateau six miles offshore from Whitstable:

We weren’t allowed to sail through the array but we did get quite close:

It was a very calm day and we had reached the Kentish Flats using Greta’s engine. This was then switched off and we slowly drifted down with the tide towards the Red Sands Maunsell Fort

Three Maunsell army forts were built in the mouth of Thames during the Second World War to help defend the country against enemy aircraft. Each fort had seven connected steel and concrete platforms: five of them had guns, one was a searchlight tower and the seventh was the control centre and accommodation area.

Manned by rotating crews of over a hundred soldiers, the fort shot down twenty-two German planes and thirty V1 flying bombs during the war, as well as acting as a deterrent to any hostile aircraft wanting to drop parachute mines into the estuary.

But these days the interconnecting walkways have been taken down and the platforms declared unsafe:

We have had friends visiting this week and they accompanied us on this trip. We didn’t see much wildlife from the boat but below is Sue’s photo of a group of juvenile common tern who waited until I was below deck trying out the marine toilet before briefly settling on the water close by:

It was a really enjoyable day out and I had wanted to go and see the Maunsell forts for ages – and now I finally have.

On another day with our visitors we drove to West Hythe for a walk along the Royal Military Canal:

The Military Canal was dug between 1804 to 1809 in response to the threat of invasion by Napoleon. It was designed to be 60 feet wide, nine feet deep and 28 miles long, running along the northern edge of Romney Marsh.

We walked westwards along the footpath and soon got a view over the ruins of Portus Lemanis with Lympne Castle, now mainly a wedding venue it seems, in the background:

A bit further on and we were walking along the bottom edge of Port Lympne animal park, which provided some of the more unusual sights to be seen from a British footpath:

We loved to see that giraffe wandering free and casually grazing a hawthorn tree.

The footpath itself provided some wildlife interest too. We came across two slow worms out in the open on the path:

And also this marsh frog:

Marsh Frogs are Europe’s largest frog species but they are invasive and non-native here in the UK. Some were brought to Kent from Hungary in 1935 and released into a garden pond on Romney Marsh, from whence they have spread across southeast England. These large frogs are bad news and eat our native wildlife including common frogs and newts and they also spread the amphibian chytrid fungus which kills native amphibian populations.

On their final day with us, our visitors came on the September tour around the dormouse boxes in the wood. It was a bumper month and we found thirteen dormice plus a nest of adorable little babies with their eyes still closed.

We had only found three dormice both in July and in August and we had speculated that this was because the boxes were too hot for them, rather than it being anything more sinister. The increase in numbers now that we are in the cooler autumn seems to support this hypothesis.

We also found a yellow-necked mouse in box 24:

Some other photos from the wood this week:

Over in the meadows, I have interesting further information about the barn owl that is visiting the meadows most nights at the moment. The news is that there are actually at least three of them! As seen below, one is colour ringed on its left leg, one is ordinarily ringed on its right leg and one is not ringed at all:

The unringed owl was here before it was actually dark one evening:

As well as these barn owls, the tawny is also regularly here:

The ringed female kestrel has unfortunately got something wrong with her left eye:

She is not going to be able to hunt very well without her binocular vision to help her judge distances:

However, this is not the first time this bird has had a bad eye. In October 2025 it was her right eye that was affected as seen below:

Back then it had got better within the week. I fervently hope it is the same this time because this is a very special bird, having been hunting in the meadows ever since she was ringed here as a young bird in September 2019.

The male thankfully seems to be fine:

The female pheasant has taken to sitting on this perch as well which seems a bit peculiar:

She is also still to be seen around the meadows with her young family following along behind her:

Our foxes would, of course, be very interested in eating these birds if they could catch them:

But they are also very partial to a tasty rabbit:

I like this photo of a companionable badger grooming session:

It’s lovely to see them all getting along nicely.

My final photo for today is of this tiny fly that I caught in a glass by my kitchen sink one morning. It is a moth fly, so called because of the shape of their wings and long antennae. There are 102 species of moth fly in the UK and this one, Clogmia albupunctata, is fairly new to Britain, having first been seen here in 2012:

Its common name is the bathroom moth fly because its larvae live in the wet slime that tends to coat the inside of drains. I expect that I found it by the kitchen sink because it had came up through the plug. It’s such a sweet little thing – shame about the unsavoury drain slime though!

The evening of Monday 14th September produced quite a spectacle that had us, and I’m sure many others around Walmer and Deal as well, craning our necks up to the skies. Tens of thousands of house martins were passing through on their long journey south to sub-Saharan Africa, and the show went on for several hours until it got too dark for us to see them:

And they kept on coming, albeit in lesser numbers, throughout the next few days by which time hundreds of thousands must surely have flown by. Apparently 1.5 to 2.5 million house martins will leave the UK at the end of each summer, which is the number of our breeding adults and all of this year’s young.

John, the bird ringer, put his nets up high in the meadows and played their calls in the hope of ringing some. The birds definitely responded to the calls and came in closer..

..but sadly his poles weren’t quite tall enough to catch any of them.

On 3rd October 2019, however, the other John was ringing in the meadows when some house martins went over. He does have high poles and put his net up, played their calls and in no time at all had caught thirty-seven of them – a number which shocked us all and meant that John had a very, very late lunch that day:

House Martins have got feathery legs to keep them warm when flying at high altitudes, and it is thought that their migration route does indeed take them over the Pyrennes. They also carry the blood-sucking flat flies, Crataerina hirundinis. These flies have poorly developed wings and cannot fly on their own but will normally be tucked in amongst the bird’s feathers. They emerged to see what was going on, though, when the bird was unexpectedly stopped by the net.

John might not have caught any house martins this week but he showed me these two birds below as a cautionary tale because, surprisingly, they are different species. The bird on the left is a chiffchaff and the bird on the right is a willow warbler:

The yellow stripe above the eye is very similar in both birds and, although you can’t see the legs in the photos, I can tell you that they were pretty much the same colour as well. These are two things that I would have used to identify them in the field, although chiffchaffs do also regularly flick their tails and willow warblers don’t. Looking at these photos, the only difference that I can really see between these two birds is that the willow warblers wings on the right are 1cm longer since they migrate further to southern Africa, whereas the chiffchaff winters around the Mediterranean or in north Africa.

Once he had the birds in the hand, John was able to tell that they were different species by looking at diagnostic differences in the primary flight feathers, but, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to do that, they can sometimes be really difficult to tell apart.

He also caught eight blackcaps. A blackcap he had caught back on 1st July weighed 16.9g and this is typical for that time of year. But the eight birds he caught this week were much heavier, varying between 18.8g to 22.6g, having gorged themselves on berries to prepare for their migration.

In a first for the meadows, a family of pheasants is being raised here this year:

Pheasants are native to Asia but have been introduced to most of Europe as a gamebird. Shockingly, an estimated 31 to 40 million of them are released into the British countryside every year in order to be shot, and unfortunately they then proceed to eat our native wildlife. But there is no shooting in the countryside immediately around the meadows and these pheasants have found somewhere where they can live a peaceful life as a small feral population. They will need to be careful of our foxes though.

A young green woodpecker is making a bid to appear on every single camera in the meadows:

Its beak looks especially long here on the perch because its tongue is slightly poking out:

A few seconds later a young wood pigeon flew across onto this perch and this seemed to make everyone feel very uncomfortable:

A juvenile great-spotted woodpecker was also seen in the meadows this week, which is a most unusual bird for here:

And there have been some nice views of the male kestrel as he comes down to have a bath:

Owls have been appearing on the cameras every night and sometimes there are photos of both species on the same night. I wonder if they ever come across each other and how that works out?

On doing a quick bit of research it seems that tawny owls are larger than barn owls and can also be highly territorial and aggressive. If food is scarce tawnies can apparently attack barn owls over their hunting grounds.

There is a little group of extraordinary-looking feral pigeons visiting the meadows at the moment. I’ve never seen ones quite like these before:

We returned from Cornwall to find the large pear tree in the orchard completely stripped of all its fruit. How I wish I’d remembered to put some trail cameras on it before I left. Back in September 2020 we got these amazing photos of tree-climbing foxes and, every September since then, I’ve been hoping for some more:

But this time I have had to content myself with these four images below, all taken on different days, of a fox making off with pears. It is the same fox on each occasion with a nick out of his right ear, and I wonder if he had to climb the tree to get them?

I think it is so endearing how much foxes love pears, but Dave finds himself slightly aggrieved that, once more, he is not going to get any pear crumble.

I am delighted to see that two of the three badger cubs that were born this year have survived the drought and there are currently six badgers in the meadows:

I am also pleased that a little weasel is once more regularly being seen here on the cameras:

This weasel will be hunting small rodents, using its slender body to follow them into their underground burrows.

I got a most unexpected moth in the trap this week:

The heath rustic is a moth of acid heaths and moorlands where heather grows, and it is a very strange sight indeed for calcareous grassland. Below is a map from the Kentmoths.org website showing the previous all-time Kent records for heath rustic:

This week I also ran the moth trap in our daughter Sally’s garden in Wye in the North Kent Downs. Our grandson is nearly four now and it was high time that he gets used to the feel of a large yellow underwing crawling on his hand:

At the end of a long, hot summer, there are lots of autumn jobs that we now need to getting on with. The meadows need to be cut for starters but also the two big ponds have had a terrible time in this dry summer and need some TLC. We have pulled out all the bulrushes that were taking over in the hide pond and its good to see some open water again:

Across in the wood, the summer drought has also taken its toll on the newish pond in the marjoram clearing. Up until this year we had been very careful to ensure that only rain water went into it, but we ran out of rainwater stores this summer and had to top it up with tap water to ensure that it didn’t totally dry out. Tap water will have picked up nutrients from its contact with the ground and, as a result, the pond has now grown duck weed:

This doesn’t seem to worry the jays who are always frequent and enthusiastic bathers:

But perhaps this tawny bowl is a bit concerned?

When I next collected the camera cards in, though, I saw that it had managed to overcome its initial hesitation:

My final photo for today is of our son Jonny who was recently in the Atacama Desert which stretches for a thousand miles between the Andes and the Chilean coast. We might have had a very dry summer here in the UK but the average annual rainfall in the Atacama is just 15mm, although some of the weather stations in the desert have never recorded rain. Because of its high altitude, nonexistent cloud cover and freedom from light pollution, it is one of the best places in the world to observe the night skies:

Twelve months ago our daughter Sarah and her family returned to live in Perranporth in the west of Cornwall, somewhere they had lived and fallen in love with several years before.

Tame rock pipits were pecking around the café tables to pick up any crumbs:

They can now walk down to Perranporth’s absolutely beautiful sandy beach, which has the added attraction of many interesting rock pools at low tide:

I had brought my battery-powered moth trap with me and ran it in their garden one night to kick off their moth list. There do seem to be an awful lot of large yellow underwings around this year and this is good news for the many bat species who are major predators of them:

One of the ways to get to their house involves driving over a low bridge across a stream that flows down their valley to the beach and thence out to sea:

A European eel, Anguilla anguilla, has its lair there, hidden amongst some rocks and weed in the stream by the bridge:

In the last 25 years this species has experienced a catastrophic collapse, with a 95% reduction in its population across Britain. This is probably due to a depressing combination of factors such as overfishing, barriers on their migratory routes, habitat loss and degradation, changes in Atlantic currents as well as pollution in our waters. These animals are now critically endangered in Britain and in many other parts of Europe.

This severe decline in Britain has had significant implications, since they once comprised over 50% of fish biomass in some European freshwater habitats and were a vital part of the food web.

These eels breed in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda and the young eel larvae cross the Atlantic and enter freshwater as they swim up our rivers and streams. They then stay there, living in these rivers and streams as well as lakes and ditches, for many years as they mature. Once they are ready to reproduce, they swim back across the Atlantic to return to the Sargasso Sea to lay their eggs and die.

It is estimated that each eel will spend ten to twenty years in our freshwater before returning back across the ocean, although this can apparently be as long as fifty years.

They are generally nocturnal but we put some oily tinned sardines into the stream to tempt the eel briefly out into the open so that we could get a proper look at it:

Excitingly, as the smell of the sardines worked its way downstream, another eel swam upriver to join the one that lives by the bridge:

I had never seen a European eel before but now I find myself a bit obsessed.

Perranporth is indeed a very lovely place to live but is also a long way from us in East Kent and we are experimenting with ways to meet up with them that works best for us all. One option is to turn our stay with them in Cornwall into a fuller holiday and we did that this time. After a few days in Perranporth, we joined a Naturetrek tour called ‘Cornwall – Beavers, Choughs and Cetaceans’.

On the first day of the Naturetrek holiday we walked along the coast from Lizard Point to Kynance Cove and then back across the headland.

A National Trust volunteer we met told us that 140 red-billed chough chicks are thought to have fledged in Cornwall this summer, which is wonderful news indeed. Our group did see around seventeen chough on this walk although I failed to get a photo. A DNA analysis of some of the birds in the Lizard area suggests that the chough have arrived naturally across from Ireland.

There is a lot of the beautiful, but aggressively invasive, hotentot fig growing around Lizard Point. This succulent is a native of South Africa and completely outcompetes rare native plants:

Kynance Cove is very picturesque but was quite busy with other humans, even on a Tuesday after the schools had gone back:

As we walked back over the headland, we found a group of around eighteen wheatear waiting for the right conditions to head south across the Channel:

And we saw a migrating whinchat:

But my highlight of the day was the sighting of a grayling butterfly – a first for me.

Our Naturetrek guide, Oliver, ran his moth trap in the hotel grounds overnight and we enjoyed going through the moths the next morning. A lot of large yellow underwings turned up again:

This female four-spotted footman is a lovely moth. At home in Kent, this would be a migrant moth but I learned that they do now breed in Cornwall and this female could well be resident:

A firecrest with its crest raised in the hotel grounds:

On the second day we went on a seven-hour pelagic wildlife boat trip out of Falmouth harbour. As we waited to be let onboard, we enjoyed watching the thicklip grey mullet, Chelon labrosus, swimming in the shallow waters of the marina:

Skipper Jake took us out to sea on the Spirit of Our Seas:

There is a lot of reflection on this screen below, but it is a sonar image of all the fish that were passing under the boat at the entrance of the river:

For a lot of the boat trip we saw very little wildlife which was unlucky. However, things improved markedly as we started to make our way back to Falmouth. A great mass of seabirds was an indication that there was a bait ball of fish close to the surface of the water:

There were also rafts of manx shearwater sitting on the surface:

It was about then that some common dolphins started bow-riding the boat. For a while there were just three of them but numbers gradually increased to eleven as others arrived to join in the fun.

I could have watched them for hours.

On the third day we visited Woodland Valley Farm near Truro and spent the day with the very inspirational farmer, Chris Jones.

In the morning Chris took us around his farm where his cattle are pasture fed and stay out on the land all year round.

He has planted trees in strips in several of his fields to produce a form of wood pasture:

His fifty head of cattle are then ‘mob-grazed’ along the strips. They are concentrated onto a quarter of an acre in the morning and then moved onto the next quarter of an acre in the afternoon. In this way they gradually work their way along all of the strips in a field and then move onto the next field where they do the same thing.

The benefits of this approach are very convincing. Each grazed area is then left untouched for months, allowing plants to regrow, form deep roots, and flower. No artificial fertilisers are needed and there are no winter housing costs for the cattle. Parasite lifecycles are broken and wormers are often no longer necessary, allowing dung beetles to flourish along with everything else that loves to eat them. As well as that, there is better soil health, drought resilience and much increased invertebrate diversity. Skylarks and meadow pipits hold a special place in Chris’ heart and they do very well indeed with this approach to grazing his land.

For our visit, his cattle were grazing on a quarter of an acre of a sixteen acre field that has not yet had rows of trees planted:

After lunch Chris took us down to the Nankilly Water stream that runs in a valley through his farm and where beavers were reintroduced into a fenced, five acre enclosure in June 2017. They had two kits in 2018 and these were the first beavers to be born in Cornwall in four hundred years.

Before the beavers arrived, it took water ten minutes to pass along Chris’ stretch of the valley. It now takes an hour and a half as it trickles into various pools and seeps out through leaky dams. The information board below has other positive changes that have happened as a result of the reintroduction of the beavers:

Another pleasing view across the beaver-created landscape:

Some trees had been felled:

And here is Chris demonstrating what you need to do if you don’t want the beavers to touch a particular tree:

After seeing around the beaver area, we went off to have some dinner in a local pub. We returned as it got dark to wait for the beavers to emerge:

A mother and one of this year’s kits did come out once it got properly dark and we got good views of them through binoculars. They didn’t seem to mind a strong beam of torch light shining on them.

We got back to the hotel at about 11pm after a long but extremely interesting day in the company of a remarkable farmer who is passionate about all nature, but especially beavers.

On the final day we visited the Cornwall Wildlife Trust Windmill Farm nature reserve, an 85 hectare reserve on the Lizard Penninsula. Since taking over this former dairy farm in 2001, the Wildlife Trust has created more than thirty pools and scrapes and seventeen species of dragonflies and damselflies are regularly seen there. This includes the lesser emperor, which we saw but which I didn’t manage to photograph, and this was a new species of dragonfly for me.

We also spotted this daffodil-yellow female red-veined darter which now breeds on the reserve:

There is a lovely area of heathland on the reserve as well, which was really good for spiders and the caterpillars of heathland moths:

We did find some great spiders. Clockwise from left: the four-spotted orbweb spider, Araneus quadratus, is Britain’s heaviest spider, the gorse orbweb spider, Agalenatea redii, and the wasp spider, Argiope bruennichi

And we found several wasp spider egg sacs:

The spectacular caterpillars we found were, clockwise from top left: The broom moth caterpillar, the drinker moth caterpillar and the fox moth caterpillar

I have lost count of how many Naturetrek trips we have done now, but we have really enjoyed every single one.

There are only around sixty British species of butterfly. After seeing the grayling for the first time this week, I wondered how many of these sixty I have seen and what it would take to see them all? It would be a wonderful project to try to tick the rest of them off over the next few years. I need to properly research this but it would probably mean a trip to Scotland or the Lake District for mountain ringlet and Ireland for cryptic wood white, and there are definitely several fritillaries that I am yet to see too. An enjoyable challenge to look forward to over the next few years!