There is something about a snowdrop valiantly pushing its way up through the frozen winter ground as a herald of spring that has earned it a lot of ardent admirers. Snowdrops (from the genus Galanthus) are not native to the British Isles but there are now many hundreds of different varieties grown here. There are often only very subtle differences between them, and it may be difficult for many to understand why galanthomania and snowdrop collecting has become such a big thing. Bidding wars have led to rare varieties selling for eye watering amounts of money – in 2022 a single bulb of ‘Golden Tears’ sold on Ebay for nearly £2,000, reminiscent of the tulip mania that so enthralled 17th century Europe.

In a small way, snowdrops do set my own pulse racing and last weekend we visited a garden in the North Downs that was bravely opening during the first weekend in February for the National Garden Scheme Snowdrop Festival.

Around 3,500 privately-owned gardens across England, Wales and Northern Ireland open under the National Garden Scheme every year. A small charge is made to enter and there are often also light refreshments and plant sales, with all proceeds going to charity. So, as well as the public getting the opportunity to be inspired by a beautiful private garden, £67 million has been raised for charity since the scheme began in 1927

The garden has around one hundred and forty different varieties of snowdrop, many of which were labelled up. Fieldgate Prelude and Don Armstrong seemed like very vigorous varieties:

The snowdrop flower has three long and three shorter tepals hanging below a cone-like ovary:

I was very taken with the varieties that had yellow rather than green ovaries and I think that Spindlestone Surprise was my favourite one in the garden:

Unfortunately there were no pots of Spindlestone Surprise on offer at the plant sales table, but I did buy two pots of Madeleine which is still a very beautiful snowdrop, although her ovaries are not quite as yellow:

I was surprised to see honey bees visiting the snowdrops although I’m afraid that I didn’t feel comfortable getting myself down onto the ground to try to photograph them – other visitors would have had to step over me. Since honey bees attempt to survive the winter, they are one of the few flying insects that are able to emerge on mild days to take advantage of what pollen is on offer.

But since pollinators are scarce in February, snowdrops do not rely on them and mainly reproduce by bulb division. However, should they get pollinated, seeds will then form in the ovary. Once flowering is over, the stems collapse and the seeds come to rest on the ground. The seeds have a protein and oil-rich protuberance on them called an elastiome which attracts ants to them. These ants carry the seeds underground in order to feed the elastiome to their larvae, but the seeds remain untouched and have now effectively been planted by the ants. I love to learn things like this.

There was also topiary to admire in the garden:

One of the joys of visiting a garden is coming away with ideas for your own garden back home. We loved this small kingfisher sculpture..

…and this swift weathervane:

I always find the taps on waterbutts frustratingly inadequate and slow-running and would love to just be able to plunge a watering can into tanks like these:

Back in the meadows, I’m always pleased to find and be able to identify new invertebrate species and this week a two-toothed door snail, Clausilia bidentata, was attached to the bottom of a trail camera sitting on a rotting log:

Yellowhammer numbers are going up. There are five here waiting for the magpies to finish, but I have seen a maximum of eight in one photo this week:

The crows here have started nest building:

I have also seen magpies flying around with sticks but haven’t yet worked out where this year’s nest is.

Over in the wood, I notice that this female sparrowhawk is ringed:

I remembered a sparrowhawk being ringed in the wood back in 2019 and looked out the photo:

Nine blue tits and a great tit here at this pond:

Unfortunately squirrels have now started carrying sticks and leaves into the owl box

They are definitely setting up home in there, but the tawny owls have not completely given up:

My final photo for today is the contents of a very exciting package that arrived this morning:

I might not have been able to purchase this snowdrop variety last weekend, but I did manage to buy a single, underwhelming little bulb on the internet when I got home. Admittedly it has a long way to go before it looks like the charming group of Spindlestone Surprises we saw last weekend, nodding their yellow-ovaried heads in the February sunshine, but I will put it into the ground now and see what next February brings.

There was a shocking murder in Canterbury in 1170 when Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, was assassinated in the cathedral. In recognition of this, since medieval times the city’s coat of arms has depicted three choughs taken from the arms of Thomas Becket:

But it is also said that a crow, witnessing the killing, flew down and paddled in Thomas Becket’s blood, getting a red beak and legs as a result and becoming the first ever chough. So Canterbury, and Kent itself, has had a long association with the chough. Indeed, choughs were once common birds on Kent’s cliffs and chalk grasslands but they were driven to extinction by habitat loss and persecution more than two hundred years ago.

Last summer, after four decades of chalk grassland restoration in the Dover area, about ten choughs were released into the wild as part of a captive breeding programme. The plan going forward is to continue to release small family-sized groups of between six to twelve choughs every year for at least five years to establish a breeding population of around fifty birds.

There have been fortifications on the cliffs overlooking Dover since at least the Bronze Age. Dover Castle is now a large and impressive structure, managed by English Heritage, and we visited it this week:

The walls of Dover Castle encompass buildings dating back to wildly differing eras. The lower two-thirds of the structure on the right is a Roman lighthouse. There was a matching one on the cliffs at the other side of the Dover valley although little remains of that one today:

Dave and his father got great views of Dover Castle when they flew over in a helicopter back in 2015. The circular Inner Bailey contains the square Great Tower, originally built by King Henry II in the 12th century:

It was at the top of this Great Tower that I started to contentedly photograph the many jackdaws that were on the roofs of the surrounding Inner Bailey. No doubt they will be nesting in amongst the chimney pots before too long:

Dave then spotted that it was not just jackdaws there, but choughs as well:

We walked along the outer walls of the castle back to the car and passed through Peverell’s Tower, a one-bedroomed property available to rent through English Heritage which has a private roof terrace with very fine views out to sea and over Dover.

Back in the meadows we took a different approach to this year’s Big Garden Birdwatch, which has been held in January every year since 1979. Whereas previously we had watched the birds from one or two set positions for the hour, this year we roamed freely over the meadows with our binoculars in our hands. This did have the advantage that we flushed a woodcock, although it was disappointing to discover that this species wasn’t on the RSPB’s list and wouldn’t be counted by them. In the end we recorded ninety-eight birds, although admittedly forty-six of these were house sparrows. Magpies also claimed more than their fair share of the total with a group of fourteen of them loitering at the end of the second meadow:

This woodcock has put in several recent night-time appearances on the cameras and it’s likely to be the one we flushed during the count:

We didn’t see any bird of prey during the hour’s birdwatching but they have been around:

We had hoped to do a Big Garden Birdwatch in the wood as well, but in the event this didn’t happen and we got on with our list of winter jobs instead. One of the barn owl boxes had fallen forward:

It was quite a wrangle but Dave managed to get it secured back up again – ready now for occupation by nesting squirrels this spring, no doubt.

The tawny owls in the wood are being seen at the box every night although I am trying hard not to get excited. This happened last year as well but they ended up nesting elsewhere:

Every winter more overgrown goat willow stools collapse in the high winds. This is in an area of the wood that we rarely go to, but we might now do some coppicing to create a small clearing around this fallen tree to finish off our work for the winter:

The blushing bracket, Daedaleopsis confragosa, likes the fallen willow wood. It is pale brown when fresh but goes this beautiful red brown colour as it ages:

Being impatient for spring, I wanted to be reassured that it was on its way by seeing some snowdrops. I finish today with the slightly underwhelming snowdrop display at Goodnestone Park which we visited this week thinking it might be a good local place to see some:

The snowdrop season is only just beginning and there is still plenty of time to improve on this as we now step into February.

I have never before owned a bridge camera but the thought of having just one lightweight camera that can take close ups of invertebrates as well as zooming in on distant birds, and everything in between, is very alluring indeed.

This week I have bought a well-reviewed Sony RX10 bridge camera which can apparently handle anything from 24mm to 600mm all on its very own:

I also have this manual and am determined to learn how to properly use this new camera:

I’ve only just started to work my way through this book but so far so good

Before the storm of this weekend we drove a little way up the coast to the hide at the Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory scrape to put my new bridge camera through its paces. We hadn’t been there for ages:

It was a bitterly cold day and the scrape was frozen:

It has been very cold in the meadows as well:

But we were pleased that the ground was frozen hard on the day that the hedgerows were cut this week, so that the heavy tractor made less of a mess with its tyres.

There is about a kilometre of hedgerow surrounding and within the meadows but half of this has now matured into trees heavily covered in ivy and has not been maintained as a hedge for many years. The other half that we can still keep as a hedge is cut every two years.

As the tractor was working in the meadows, a buzzard flew in to see if whatever was going on had thrown up any opportunities for a meal:

This is probably the same buzzard seen on a different day:

When I looked at the trail cameras after the hedges were cut, the tractor had made many cameo appearances:

A pair of bullfinch have been coming to this baking tray for a few days now. This is an unusual species for the meadows, although a female bullfinch was ringed here two or three years ago. Male and female:

The male bullfinch is a most beautiful bird:

Numerous blackbirds are also appearing on the cameras, many of which will just be here for the winter, across from the colder parts of Europe:

One of them has fallen foul of a sparrowhawk though and won’t be leaving in the spring:

The blackcaps that are here in the winter have come from Central Europe and will also be returning there before long. They will be replaced by our breeding blackcaps who are currently seeing out the rest of the winter in North Africa:

Another seasonal visitor is this woodcock, escaping the extreme conditions of Finland and Russia at this time of year:

I don’t know where our yellowhammers go for the winter but they start reappearing in January to prepare for the breeding season and the first pair arrived back this week:

A fox coming into the meadows from the densely vegetated cliff:

I think this is the same fox and unfortunately it has mange:

It has been very cold in the wood as well:

Our winter work in the wood has been given a little boost by a woodsman who needed some hazel poles to do hedgelaying elsewhere. He has coppiced a row of twelve hazel stools and made a dead hedge at the back with what he doesn’t need. The poles he wants are still lying on the ground here, waiting for him to take them away to lay his hedge:

The tawny owls are showing interest in the box where they raised two chicks in 2022:

But, as usual, there is a lot of squirrel activity there as well:

It will be interesting to see what happens this spring.

The old cherry tree has produced a lot of resin in response to green woodpeckers drilling out a new hole last year:

I wonder what will happen here as well?

Things were pretty tempestuous as Storm Isha blew her way across the country this weekend. Another small tree came down across the access track to the wood but other than that we got off fairly lightly:

It was a welcome opportunity to stay inside and continue to learn about my new bridge camera. When the weather improves, I want to be ready to go out, camera in hand, and take some photos I am pleased with.

Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey is only an hour’s drive from home and last year we stayed in one of their shepherd’s huts in January and again in May. Both visits were so completely enjoyable that we are doing the same this year as well.

Thousands of waterfowl come to overwinter at Elmley and great flocks rise and fall over the marsh. It was wonderful to see such a density of birds in one place.

Elmley is known for its marsh harrier roost in the winter – last January there had been 110 of these birds of prey circling the reed beds at dusk, arriving from throughout northern Kent as the light starts to fade. On the night we stayed this week there were about 45 coming in to roost.

But perhaps the main draw for us, bringing us back to the reserve in the depths of winter, was the prospect of seeing owls.

There are also seven pairs of barn owls resident on the reserve. We took a walk at dusk and saw three different barn owls hunting in the rough grassland around us. The next morning we returned at first light and were delighted to again see three barn owls.

We went on a walking tour with the warden of the reserve and he showed us a structure in the glamping area that was used as a camp kitchen last summer:

But this winter the barn owls have been roosting in it, producing a lot of white birds muck and fresh black pellets:

We also saw a barn owl taking shelter in a kestrel box:

The old school house dates from the late 19th century when there was a small brick-making factory down on the banks of the Swale where the reed beds are today. The school is now in ruins but is home to one of the three pairs of little owls who are resident on the reserve:

We were only at Elmley for twenty-four hours but, in that short time, we have been reinvigorated by immersion in the wonders of the natural world.

We have returned home inspired and impatient for our next stay in May. The short-eared owls will be gone by then but there should be baby animals and invertebrates to compensate us for that.

We may have only gained about half an hour of daylight since the winter solstice, but I can really feel that difference. The tide has turned and we are forging full steam ahead towards spring here, although inevitably there will be some hiccups along the way.

As the end of the building project finally approaches, some building materials are left over that would be good to use in the meadows to create habitat:

The sun shone on Boxing Day and visiting family were lured outside to create an art installation-cum-invertebrate sanctuary with the roof tiles:

Before spring does arrive, there are a lot of jobs that need to be done. The nest boxes hadn’t been emptied in the meadows and so we started with that:

Over in the wood, the storm brought a small tree down across an access track:

There are far too many squirrels in the wood and they have been attacking the dormouse boxes. We went round cleaning these boxes out this week, so that they are ready for when the dormice reawaken in the spring. Unfortunately we discovered that seven of them are going to need to replacing:

There is much that we want to achieve in the wood before spring rolls in. In the marjoram grove, all the dogwood has now been cut down so that it won’t shade out the marjoram:

We have also been working on other previously cleared areas to ensure that they remain open and sunny:

I couldn’t resist looking under this large piece of corrugated tin left over from the pheasant-rearing days of the wood….

…and found a hibernating toad – a new species for the wood:

Two new treecreeper boxes have gone up:

It is going to be easy to get a trail camera on this one to see what is using it:

As usual at this time of year, the trail cameras have been very quiet, but they have shown that this sparrowhawk is visiting everyday:

And this is a very dark buzzard:

A bowl of hyacinths in the house is such comfort at this time of year, a harbinger of the warmer and lighter days of spring that are to come.

With the relentless north-easterly winds that have been howling across the meadows these last couple of days, this cannot come soon enough for us.

We will always remember 2023 as the year that we had the builders in. At the beginning of February they arrived to build a new garage, workshop and utility room and they are with us still – although we hope that we are nearly there now.

A lot of very chalky soil was excavated – perfect for growing wild flowers on, we realised:

We decided to ask them to create us a butterfly bank in the meadows with some of this soil. Its slopes would offer a range of different aspects to the sun, to suit the specific requirements of a wide variety of burrowing invertebrates. As well as that, the low nutrition soil would discourage grasses, enabling flowers to thrive and attract pollinators.

The weather in 2023 was very different to the terrible drought of 2022. Although it was still a hot year, with record temperatures in both June and September, there was a lot more rain. Here is the same early August meadow scene – in 2023 on the left and 2022 on the right:

Thankfully this year the ponds retained some water, the grass remained green and I didn’t have to worry about what the caterpillars of second brood butterflies were going to eat.

1. Birds

This autumn five birds of prey were regularly hunting in the meadows and I’m taking this as encouraging evidence that what we are doing here is making a difference.

The fifth bird of prey is the sparrowhawk. These birds are on the cameras every day:

The bird ringing highlight of the year was a juvenile nuthatch that flew into the ringers’ nets in August. In the spring and summer, a nuthatch will eat tree-dwelling insects but in the autumn and winter this changes to nuts and seeds. Their beak is strong enough to peck through hazel nuts but only once the nut has been held firm in the bark of a mature English oak. Our thin and chalky soils in this eastern part of Kent do not favour English oaks and consequently we do not get nuthatches here. Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory just up the coast has been keeping ringing records since 1952 and in all that time a nuthatch has not been ringed or recovered there.

It is always so enjoyable when there is a ringing session on in the meadows and we get a chance to see the animals in such detail, as well as talking birds with John and John, the ringers.

This summer there were several yellowhammer territories in the meadows. I wish we had taken the time to properly count and record them and will start to do that from now on. In our first year here, nearly a decade ago now, there were no yellowhammers in the meadows.

Another success of 2023 was that, after four years of playing loud swift calls into the skies between May and August, a pair of swifts nested here for the first time.

This year our ponds were adopted by a pair of mallards – presumably while they were laying their eggs.

2. Invertebrates

I love to photograph the invertebrates in the meadows and then attempt to identify them and learn about their often wacky lifestyles. This cluster fly, for instance, one of eight Pollenia species in the UK, is parasitic on earthworms and lays its eggs near worm burrows, the fly larvae then feeding on the worms.

The dark-edged bee-fly parasitises the nests of ground-nesting solitary mining bees – particularly Andrena species. She will flick her eggs towards the nest and, once those eggs hatch, the fly larvae will then crawl into the bee nest and live off the grubs.

Brown-lipped snail are hermaphrodites but the one on the right below has fired a sharp ‘love-dart’ at its partner prior to mating and this can still be seen sticking into it. Why some species of land snail do this is not yet completely understood but the dart does transfer chemicals that improve the chances of fathering young for the snail firing the dart.

We have a colony of small blue butterflies in the meadows. The female butterfly lays an egg into a kidney vetch flower and, by the time that egg hatches, the flower is going over. The caterpillars are cleverly disguised to look like the developing seed pods of the flower.

The wasp spider is the largest orb weaving spider in the UK (builders of spiral, wheel-shaped webs) and it is a grasshopper specialist. It creates its web low in the grasses and waits for a grasshopper to make a fatal mistake:

This little thing was in my kitchen in July and I eventually discovered that it was a cockroach larva (the two cerci sticking up at the end of the abdomen are a giveaway) – not one of our three native species but also not one of the horrible invasive species that need to live in our buildings because they can’t cope with the British climate. This cockroach, which I believe is the variable cockroach, has newly arrived in the UK and is very under reported but it does live outside, which was a huge relief. I subsequently found several more out in the meadows. They are very distinctive with that white band:

In September I then found one of the adults hiding in the workings of a trail camera:

Another unwelcome find was this enormous gypsy moth caterpillar tucked away in the back of a trail camera that was strapped to an apple tree. It was about 5cm long – enormous – and you wouldn’t ‘t want those hairs to touch your skin. Really beautiful colours though:

This is an amazing little moth though. It is the twenty-plume moth. Each of the two forewings and two hind wings are split into six deeply-divided feathery plumes. This is actually a total of twenty-four plumes.

My last invertebrate is the great green bush-cricket. Including the ovipositor, this monster was about 7cm long. We had a shock to discover that something so enormous was living in the meadows and we had had no idea:

3. Other things

The meadow grasses grew noticeably much taller in 2023 than in the drought of 2022 – perhaps double the height

The hay pile resulting from the September cut has never been so large:

Despite not letting a single alexander set seed for the last two years, our alexander problem seems to be getting worse rather than better. Here is the cliff-line path in March:

This year we decided to dig them all out rather than just cut off their flowers. This was a huge job and we toiled for hours out in the meadows in March. The problem is that they have a large carrot underground and are difficult to get out cleanly. But I can confidently say that, yet again, no alexander set seed here in 2023. Surely eventually all our work will pay off and the alexander situation will improve.

At the end of February the annual frog spawning went off without any major drama. The herons generally behaved themselves, the spawn was not laid in too shallow water and the pond went on to have water in it all summer giving the tadpoles a chance to mature.

This male smooth newt was vigorously wagging his tail at a female – I had always hoped that I would see this courtship dance one day and, in April, I finally did:

It was also lovely to see this great heap of slow worms under one of the sampling squares in May:

There is no doubt that there were many more rabbits in the meadows than in previous years:

This population growth has suited the foxes as well as producing some rabbit-grazed pockets in the meadows where the grass is kept really short and offers a different type of habitat.

I had forgotten how lovely the meadows are in May when all the buttercups are out:

And that finishes my review of the meadows for 2023. A new year has just begun and there is much to anticipate in 2024. Will the badgers have cubs this year? Will the swifts return to the box? Will we ever see that barn owl again? I am so looking forward to finding out the answers to these questions and to many more as the year plays out. A Happy New Year to all.

1. Woodland Birds

It has been nearly five years now since we took over at the wood and every year more of its secrets are revealed to us. It was only when no rain fell in February that we noticed the large amount of birds muck that was accumulating on the bramble understorey in the silver birch area. We staged a stakeout and witnessed hundreds of crows coming in to roost at dusk:

In January we dug a new pond in the marjoram glade:

The new pond was very quickly adopted by the winter birdlife…

…including this heron, a new species for the wood:

As well as redwing and fieldfare, the winter wood also shelters a large number of woodcock, escaping the harsh conditions in Finland and Russia:

Our son, who is an engineer, designed and built us a structure to get a camera close enough to the tawny owl box to have its sensors triggered:

The new camera immediately started to get great shots of the owls who were frequently using the box in the early part of the year:

Although we did also see a stock dove checking out the box, another new species for the wood. These birds usually nest in cavities in rotten trees but will use a nest box if they get the chance:

Squirrels were also frequently seen around the box:

But the owls had been photographed at the box so often that John and John, the bird ringers, came to open up the box in early May to see if there were any owlets inside that could be ringed:

With its underdeveloped tail feathers, I believe that this is a tawny owl chick that successfully fledged this year somewhere in the wood

The buzzard is another bird of prey that lives in the wood:

One sunny afternoon in April, a trail camera took a photo of this young rabbit:

Twenty seconds later a second photo was taken as a buzzard flew down onto it:

Other bird photos from the wood this year:

2. Plants and Invertebrates

We paid more attention to the mechanics of tree and plant flowering in the wood this year. In February, the hazel trees are in flower and it is good that we now thoroughly understand hazel nut production because it’s important for dormice. Every hazel tree has both male and female flowers – the catkins are male and release pollen to be wafted around amongst the trees before they get their leaves. The female flowers are the little red buds, usually found at the top of the catkins, and these can only be fertilised by pollen from other hazel trees. Once pollinated, the female flower goes on to develop into a cluster of hazel nuts.

There are a large number of primroses that come into flower in April:

We were fascinated to discover that some primrose plants have pin-eyed flowers and some have thrumb-eyed ones and this is a device to encourage cross pollination.

In April, we found a new and extensive area of the Town Hall Clock plant, Adoxa moschatellina, which was very pleasing. This plant spreads most successfully by putting out long underground stolons and, although we had never noticed it growing here before, it is quite close to the one patch that we had previously known about.

And in May the wood comes alive with bugle which is tremendously popular with pollinators, such as this hairy-footed flower bee:

I was in this bugle clearing when I noticed some bees that I didn’t recognise, flying low and flitting around, never stopping long enough to have their picture taken. Then I realised that some of them were using small twigs as broom sticks. They were Osmia bicolour – the two-coloured mining bee. The female makes her nest in empty snail shells and then disguises the shell with the twigs that she flies in with, all then bound together with her saliva. To sit and watch them on that May morning was completely magical, although the best photograph of the stick-carrying I got is on the right below – the bee was flying with the stick that she has now landed on top of before she scurried down into the undergrowth with it:

In July the marjoram glade comes into its own, drawing in many different woodland butterflies:

This year peacocks were very prominent:

And there were loads of mint moths, perfectly matched to the colour of the marjoram:

As the summer progressed, the new pond developed blanket weed unfortunately, but it did host a population of pond skaters and here is an adult and some babies feeding on a cricket that has drowned:

I also found this glow worm larva struggling in the water but was able to rescue it before it was too late:

In August I saw this black clouded longhorn beetle…

And the thistles that grow to a height of more than two metres in the clearings had lots of these cuckoo bees visiting them:

As autumn arrived, we showed Dan Tuson, the East Kent farm conservation advisor for Natural England, around the wood. He suggested that we sow our woodland clearings with native pollinator-friendly plants to support the work that he is doing in the surrounding fields.

We have sown some seed in several different clearings and are now looking forward to seeing if this makes a difference next year.

3. Mammals of the Wood

Back in 2022 we managed to get a trail camera on a fox den which resulted in some lovely photos of the vixen and her cubs. But that hole was not used by foxes again this year unfortunately, and neither were any of the other burrows I speculatively trained a camera on:

But, even though I didn’t manage to find any of the dens, there were several families of fox cubs born in the wood this year:

We had a very successful year of dormouse monitoring:

However, as in the previous year, the dormice seemed to prefer the heavy ‘woodcrete’ bird boxes to the wooden dormouse boxes:

A trail camera also caught a bat at a bird box:

We found a pygmy shrew living in an old dormouse nest in October:

We didn’t see a polecat in the wood this year but a weasel visited one of the ponds in September:

As I have been pulling these photos together, now in the dead of winter, it has been so bolstering to remember how wonderful the wood is in the spring and summer. I can’t wait to do it all again in 2024 and see what other woodland secrets there are to be revealed.

December has been galloping along but now we find ourselves in a short lull before we plunge headlong into Christmas. Things are mostly in place for the big day and there’s time to report on what has been going on in the meadows and the wood this December.

Now that the dormice are definitely hibernating, it’s high time to get going on the winter clearing and coppicing work planned for the wood this winter – but things have been busy and we are yet to start.

But we have kicked off proceedings by doing a tour of the various bird boxes to clear out any old nest material:

There seems to be a bottomless demand for small nest boxes in the wood – every box I looked in had a nest of some sort in it. We need to get some more up this winter.

Some other photos from the wood this December:

The hedgerows in the meadows were laden with a bumper crop of hawthorn berries this autumn and I wanted to see how much of a food larder still remains for the animals trying to survive out there.

The widower fox continues to look very moth-eaten but I am hoping that he will soon get a fresh growth of fur. Heartbreakingly, he has started to come up towards the house at dusk to await the nightly peanuts in exactly the same spot as his mate used to sit:

Corvids are a very prominent part of the winter wildlife in the meadows:

Along with the stock doves and the woodpigeon, these two feral pigeons have been arriving at the feeding cages for the last few weeks. It’s the first time that feral pigeons have discovered this food source and I don’t really mind, but hope that they don’t tell their friends:

I recently came across this photo from 2007. Back then I was a foster mother for a wildlife hospital in the Thames Valley, hand-feeding litters of rabbits and hedgehogs in my home until they were weaned and could be returned to the hospital and prepared for release back into the wild:

We so rarely see hedgehogs here in our East Kent meadows, and have never seen one in the wood, that it was a delightful surprise to see a photo of these babies again. I do remember that they had voracious appetites and I was very quickly able to wean them and successfully move them on to the next stage of their lives.

At this time of year, the low winter sun creates long shadows across the meadows even in the middle of the day:

Today is the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year. From here we head, inch by inch, towards spring. Here’s quite a bit of winter to go yet, but it’s good to know that we are on our way..

All that now remains is for me to wish you a very Happy Christmas and I do hope you will continue with me into 2024 to see what the new wildlife year brings.

Last winter I was engaged in an intense battle of wits with a rat who hoped to carry off all my tulip bulbs. I had planted over a hundred tulips in November but, by early December, I noticed that nearly every bulb had been very precisely dug up and removed:

I put a trail camera in the allotment and caught the perpetrator red-handed, walking away with one of the few remaining bulbs:

Although by then it was late in the season, I did manage to buy forty more bulbs. After they were replanted, wire netting was pegged down over the bed:

I rather smugly supposed this would be the end of the matter but the rat had other ideas. It dug down at the edge of the wire by the rosemary bush and tunnelled up to each of this second batch of bulbs from below:

Although I was rather impressed with the rat and greatly admired its ingenuity, I also really like growing unusual varieties of tulip to cut and bring into the house in the spring.

This April we visited Pashley Manor’s tulip festival and a bulb supplier, Bloms Bulbs, had a marquee there to showcase their wares:

I asked if they had any suggestions for dealing with my rat conundrum. I was expecting them to recommend poisoning or trapping the rat but, instead, I was pleasantly surprised when they suggested rolling the bulbs in chilli before planting.

This November, full of optimism for the new chilli weapon in my armoury, I have again bought a hundred tulip bulbs:

I also purchased a kilogram of chilli powder:

As an additional measure, we decided to plant the bulbs in a raised bed which would be easier to net and would offer more protection to tunnelling in from the side:

Wearing rubber gloves, I dipped each bulb in water and then plopped it into the chilli bag before planting:

So, this year’s battle has now commenced and I await the rat’s next move with interest.

This autumn has been wet and stormy and the trail cameras have kept needing to come in to be dried out on the Aga. But they have managed to get some photos of all the five species of birds of prey that have been hunting in the meadows this season:

Winter-visiting birds have been arriving and appearing on the cameras:

A long term resident of the meadows is a handsome fox who was the mate of the One-eyed Vixen and over the years the pair have raised many cubs in the meadows.

This year, however, he has had an annus horribilis – we have lost the One-eyed Vixen and he is now a widower. But, as well as that, he has had mange all year. I tried to treat this twice earlier in the year but was unsuccessful. This autumn I have treated him again and am pleased to report that this time it has worked:

I am dedicating this blog post to my special father-in-law who died this week. Joining the RAF as a young man during the war and remaining with them for most of his career, he had a long and rich life, full of adventure. He was good company, a dispenser of amazing stories and very interested in the lives of other people. He was also a kind and lovely man.

November can be a difficult month so this year we decided that, rather than simply enduring it, we would celebrate it instead by going to France to witness a wildlife spectacle that happens there at this time of year. Lac du Der is in the Champagne region of France and, in November, thousands of common cranes gather at the lake before continuing their migration onwards towards Spain.

The weather forecast for the week was pretty awful so we packed all our waterproofs and warm clothes and got onto a ferry heading across The Channel. We were joining a Naturetrek holiday and the cranes were to be the grand finale of the week. The first part of the holiday was spent exploring the area around the Forêt d’Orient.

We arrived a day before the rest of the group and spent time exploring the region, including visiting Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, where Charles de Gaulle lived and is buried. There is now a fantastic museum and a memorial to him there.

This sign propped up by the side of the road reminded us that hunting (la chasse) in France starts in September and goes on until the end of February and that we needed to take great care when walking in woodland.

A striking feature of this part of France is the amount of mistletoe growing on the trees:

Once we had joined up with the Naturetrek group, who had travelled to Paris on Eurostar and then been picked up in minibuses, the fifteen of us spent several days exploring the woodlands and lakes of the Forêt D’Orient along with our two guides.

By the end of the week, the group had seen around a hundred species of birds, some of them absolute corkers. Sadly, though, we did not see or hear the enormous black woodpecker although we did have several sightings of a middle-spotted woodpecker, a new species for us.

We also saw a lot of water pipit, another first:

It is always a delight to see little owls and a pair were spotted on a walk around one of the villages:

We saw three white-tailed sea eagles, although all at a great distance. This juvenile bird is next to a corvid to give it scale:

It takes seven years for the eagle to reach adulthood and only then does it get its white tail:

There were a very large number of great white egrets and grey herons living in and around the lakes:

There were also cattle egrets:

I found this next scene quite frankly amazing and stood mesmerised by it for ages:

The lakes are actually man-made reservoirs supplying water to Paris and are at their lowest levels at this time of year. I assume that a shoal of fish had become stranded in this little inlet causing this bird mayhem.

This dense black slick in the water was discovered to be hundreds and hundreds of coots and they stayed all together like this for the entire time we were watching them. This was very odd and I have no idea what was going on:

November is a great time to see fungal fruiting bodies and there were many of these to be seen in the forest. I wasn’t sure quite what I was seeing when I found a small group of scarlet octopuses amongst the leaf litter:

One area of the forest is known for fire salamanders. The larval stage of these salamanders lives in water but the adults are to be found under logs by day, emerging at night to hunt for their invertebrate prey. We walked around the woodland, carefully turned over logs to see if we could find one of these salamanders:

At first we only found frogs under the logs. Although these look very much like our British common frogs, they are in fact a different species – they are agile frogs. These frogs can jump up to two metres in a single leap when escaping from predators

Eventually we got lucky and found a small fire salamander under a log:

Over the course of the week, we saw several Asian hornets flying around. We also spotted an abandoned Asian hornet nest five metres up a tree:

The week’s weather was very much better than had been forecast and we managed to spend a series of long days out in the field. Our picnic lunches were prepared by our two fantastic guides, Jason and Emilie Mitchell:

One afternoon we were shown round the medieval centre of Troyes by a city guide.

The building below was used as a local headquarters by the German army when they occupied the city during the war:

When the American Army arrived to liberate the city in 1944, the building was heavily machine-gunned and, spine chillingly, still bears those scars today:

On another afternoon, we had a tour of the cellars and bottling plant of the Drappier champagne house:

Drappier champagne is available in many sizes….

…including their largest bottle of all – a thirty litre melchisedech bottle. This bottle costs around six thousand euros and is very difficult to lift and pour but they do still sell several a year:

The tour ended with a champagne tasting. The champagne was very enjoyable – including the ‘nature’ type, where they add no sugar so that the champagne taste is pure and not masked by the extra sweetness. We bought a bottle of that as well. But the whole experience was made all the more memorable because we were joined by old Monsieur Drappier himself – now ninety-seven, he was the person who first started making champagne rather then red wine there back in 1947. He has now safely seen in seventy-seven harvests.

But now to finish with the cranes. Lac du Der is also a reservoir supplying Paris and the water levels are really low in November, exposing many islands and promontories for the cranes to safely roost on.

Three villages were drowned when the valley was dammed in 1974:

Common cranes breed in Russia and surrounding countries and then migrate along a straight line south-west to spend the winter in Spain. Lac du Der has become an important stop-over point along this route where they roost in the lake basin by night and fuel up on missed potatoes lying in the nearby fields by day. The number of cranes here is variable but on 3rd November 2019 there were a record 268,120 of them there. The global population of common crane is now 700,000 birds – this is gradually increasing as a result of changes in farming practices which now supplies them with an abundance of food during the winter and along their migration routes. I do so love a good news story.

The bird count a few days before we arrived at Lac du Der was 23,000 which was well short of the record, but there were still just so many cranes coming in to roost before dusk:

They are loud and vocal birds as they fly and the soundscape was all encompassing. We stood and watched in awe as group after group arrived and landed:

The juveniles, with brown rather than black, white and red heads, travel with their parents to be shown the way:

Although we had thought it a good idea when we booked this holiday months ago, as the time drew near and the weather and forecast were terrible, we were not looking forward to it at all. But in fact we had a wonderful week, surrounded by Frenchness, in a lovely group of people and seeing lots of things that we had never experienced before.

Now we need to have a think about what to do next November..