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!