There has been a recent spell of sunny, calm autumnal weather and Dave has been getting on with the annual cut of the meadows. He’s getting there now:

As usual about a third is being left to protect invertebrate populations overwintering amongst the grasses and flowers, as well as providing shelter for small mammals, birds and reptiles.

We call it a tractor but in truth it is not much more than a large ride-on mower with a good collection system, and it takes Dave many hours of driving around out there to get the job done. I do believe it’s a labour of love for him, although he seems reluctant to admit it.

In the area below we are conducting an experiment. This bit hadn’t been cut for the last two years and had developed some patches of bramble and rose which needed removing. But it also has large numbers of yellow meadow ant nests which are doing a good job of keeping the grasses at bay and which we would like to keep. So Dave plunged in with the tractor, weaving a sinuous path between woody growths but avoiding the anthills as best as he could:

Birds of prey are always interested once the cutting commences and the rodents and reptiles have fewer places to hide:

She has been very much in evidence this week:

A male kestrel, with his grey head and many fewer spots on his wing feathers, has been around almost as much as the female this week:

He too does lots of bathing:

I was pleased to see this photo of them together, providing evidence for what I had hoped – that they are a pair:

The buzzard is really quite an enormous bird:

And is particularly good at striking a dramatic pose:

It too likes a good bath:

We have been hearing tawny owls at night and they have also been on the cameras:

And a barn owl has returned too – always so very much leggier than the tawny:

Our neighbours have a walnut tree in their garden but say they never get any nuts from it. Seeing these photos below, I suspect I know why:

Presumably these corvids’ beaks are powerful enough to crack open a walnut which is pretty amazing.

We don’t get squirrels here, so birds making off with next door’s walnuts is no doubt why there is now a flourishing walnut tree slap bang in the middle of the second meadow:

It has been a long, hot summer and the wild pond has developed blanket weed for the first time ever:

I have donned my waders and gone in, on a mission to pull out any reeds encroaching into open water. I also tried scooping out the blanket weed and discovered it formed only the thinnest of surface layers which was good news. The pond is fed by water coming off the roofs of the house and garage, which is then carried 100m along an underground hosepipe. This has meant that we haven’t needed to add any tap water which, with all its nutrients and added chemicals, is not good for pond health.

There is much clearing work still to be done in this pond if we get time this autumn. But we can’t delay – come the winter, male frogs will be hibernating in the mud at the bottom and I worry that they would get squashed if we were to go in then.

All this year we have been part of a small team of wildlife volunteers at Walmer Castle who have been running weekly wildlife tours around the grounds. On our walk this week I saw a ladybird with no spots:

In the UK, native ladybird eggs are generally laid in spring. The larvae feed for a month or so and then pupate, with the new adults emerging in late summer. These new adults will then hibernate over the winter, breeding the following spring. The invasive harlequin ladybirds, however, have at least two generations each year.

But, when they first emerge from the pupa, adult ladybirds will have no black spots and these only slowly develop over a few hours or even days. Looking at the black and white markings at the front of the ladybird above, I think that this is a harlequin ladybird and that in a few days it will look like the harlequin below that we also saw during the walk:

I also found this orange ladybird, Halyzia sedecimguttata, in the moth trap this week:

An autumn crocus variety, Crocus speciosus, was flowering amongst the grasses in the castle meadows:

Another species of autumn crocus is the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, which has been cultivated and traded across Eurasia for over 3,500 years. It will apparently grow well in this country, and is available from many UK bulb suppliers, enabling you to grow and harvest your own saffron. I like the idea of doing that:

We are very late in the butterfly season now, and it is mainly wall butterflies that I am seeing. On cool mornings the males spend much time basking in sunny spots such as here on a reptile sampling square:

The pears have gone from the tree in the orchard and I have stopped the surveillance. The fruit higher up must have all been taken by birds because, as far as I could tell, the foxes did not climb the tree. The fun is now all over until next year:

I would have liked to have made this lovely feathered Ranunculus, Polymixis lichenea, my moth of the week:

However, it is this small micro moth below that has earned the prestigious moth of the week award because of all the drama it caused:

Despite ploughing through the thick micro moth field guide twice, I could not find it in there. To me it looked ever so much like the European grapevine moth, Lobesia botrana, which has only ever been recorded four times previously in Kent.

Native to Southern Italy, this moth is a major vineyard pest in the several countries that it has been accidentally introduced into. With the huge boom in Kent vineyards in recent years, I felt that finding this moth here had potentially serious ramifications.

I contacted the County Micro Moth Recorder who confirmed that it was going to need genital dissection to categorically establish its ID. He has recently visited the meadows and we also wanted to show him round the wood, so we met up with him there one day this week to pass across the moth for dissection.

Walking round the wood with him, we saw it from a completely fresh angle – that of the hundreds of moth species that have made the wood their home. We were shown lots of leaf mines made by the larval stage of micro moths – sometimes several species on a single leaf. He also found a bagworm larval case on some bark and some reddish eruptions on a cherry tree trunk that was evidence of a cherry tree tortrix moth larva at work.

The cherry tree tortrix adult is an absolute beauty:

It was all fascinating stuff and we are now really interested to find out more.

Once he had further investigated the queried moth later that day, the County Moth Recorder reported back that it was not in fact the very rare European grapevine moth, Lobesia botrana, but was the very similar wood marble, Lobesia reliquana. In the field guide, this wood marble moth is said to only fly in May and June but the book is out of date and there is now a second generation.

I can count seventeen siskin seen at this woodland pond this week:

Redwing spend the winter in the vicinity of the wood and the first of these seem to have already arrived:

Last weekend’s high-adrenaline Walmer lifeboat training took place on the sea just below the meadows, giving us ringside seats. The coastguard helicopter was lowering a winchman down towards the RNLI’s ‘Hounslow Branch’ larger boat:

It’s good to practice this in good conditions because one day they might find themselves doing it for real in a storm.

It was even calmer still on another day this week when the sea disguised itself as a placid mirror. Towards the end of every afternoon flights of gulls, that have been feeding inland, noisily fly over the meadows to roost in rafts on the sea. It is very atmospheric and a reminder to us that the day is drawing to a close and it’s almost time to go in.

It’s very rare indeed that the sea here looks this benign. I understand that we will have Storm Amy visiting us shortly and this view will soon be looking very different indeed.

This week we found ourselves strolling along Walmer seafront while the Walmer RNLI lifeboat crew were having their regular Sunday morning training session.

We got chatting to some of the volunteers at the station and discovered that the bigger boat, called the ‘Hounslow Branch’, is new and only arrived in March this year. It was funded by Lorna Newman who lived in Hounslow and left her entire estate to the RNLI, which was used to buy the £330,000 boat. Additionally, the specialist blue tractor cost about half a million pounds, the trailer about £130,000 and the small D class boat around £110,000. When you consider that there are 238 RNLI stations around the UK, it’s clear that this charity has really huge capital costs. Yet over 90% of their funding comes from donations with only 1% coming from Government sources.

In the autumn the meadows have their annual cut and the arisings are taken away. In this way the soil will slowly be losing its nutrients, which will favour flowering plants over the bullying grasses. Little by little the land is emerging as invertebrate-diverse flower meadows rather than grassy fields. This slow process is enhanced, in a small way, every September when we buy some native flower seed from Emorsgate Seeds.

We choose a particularly grassy section and spread their EM6F seed mix on it, consisting of various native perennial flowers suited for calcareous soils. This is to inject the grassland with flowering plants that will then spread their own seeds next year and thus continue on into the future.

As well as the EM6F mix, we always buy some other seeds to enjoy experimenting with. The ideal would be to have flowers constantly available during the summer that can feed both short and long-tongued invertebrates.

There are always a few bladder campion plants growing in the meadows every year but we would like to encourage more. The plant releases its fragrance, nectar and pollen in the evening to lure long-tongued moths to reach into the flower for the nectar and thereby pollinate it. Long-tongued bees will then mop up any remaining nectar during daylight hours. Kent is a hotspot for rare long-tongued bees such as the shrill carder bee and the ruderal bumblebee and it would be wonderful if we could support a population of these here.

Another plant with a very long flower tube is honeysuckle. There are a few honeysuckle plants scrambling through the hedgerows already, but I have now also planted a wall of native honeysuckle against the east face of a shed. This is a shade-loving plant that also releases its fragrance in the evening to attract long-tongued moths.

As I worked, I was being closely observed by a couple of robins and this little dunnock, all interested in any soil invertebrates that might have been exposed by the digging .

The beautiful ringed kestrel has been hunting in the meadows every day:

And as usual the magpies are doing what they can to drive her off:

She frequently takes a bath:

And this is what she looks like immediately afterwards:

If she can hunt from a perch rather than having to hover, she will use less energy and will therefore need to find less food to stay alive:

Here she is with a vole:

The buzzard is also still around:

And tawny owls are hunting at night:

One of the magpies has caught itself a green cricket:

I don’t know what prey this fox has in its mouth, but its quite big and looks like a mammal:

The foxes have now removed all the low hanging fruit from the pear tree:

If they are going to climb up into the tree to get the few remaining pears higher up, it will be in the next couple of nights.

The moth of the week this time is the olive tree pearl, Palpita vitrealis, which turned up in the trap. This is a moth of southern Europe where its larvae feed on olive trees and jasmine. It is a scarce but regular immigrant here but cannot survive our winters. The wings are beautifully translucent with a slight sheen

I did get lots of interesting moths in the trap this week. I start going through the trap just as it gets light – usually still in my pyjamas, I’m afraid. But this week I was kept company by a pair of large leopard slugs. One slug was in hot pursuit of the other as they travelled all over the place.

I presume that this was a prelude to mating.

The mating of leopard slugs is the stuff of legends and how I would love to see it one day. The courtship behaviour goes on for hours and then both slugs climb into a tree or other high area and lower themselves down, entwined together, on a thick string of mucus. Their blue, translucent mating organs then come out of their bodies and dangle below their bodies, connecting together while they exchange sperm. Both participants will later lay hundreds of eggs.

I am really kicking myself for not going out with a torch and camera that evening to try to see this behaviour.

One chilly morning we noticed that male ivy bees were roosting all over the place, on leaves and ivy heads, waiting for warmth from the sun before they got moving:

Over in the wood, an unusual mammal has paid a visit:

There was another infrequently-seen mammal in one of the dormouse boxes as well:

We found fourteen dormice in September’s tour round the thirty dormouse nest boxes in our wood. This included a family of a mother and four babies whose eyes had just recently opened:

In a post earlier this month I was wondering why the spots on a giraffe can be so variable between animals:

I am delighted to say that Joe, a reader of the blog, has been able to explain this to me. There are several species and sub-species of giraffe that are found in different areas of Africa, each having identifiably distinctive spots as shown by this diagram:

I will now never be able to see a giraffe again without trying to work out where it is from!

On 15th September 2015 I published my first ever blog post, hoping to document our journey of discovery as we started to manage six acres of coastal grassland for nature. Back then, I had no idea of how little I knew. Now, ten years and 586 posts later, it is probably true to say that I still know very little, even though it is considerably more than before.

We are in the middle of this year’s Heritage Open Days festival which runs from 12th to 21st September. Every year thousands of places across the country throw open their doors for free to celebrate our history and culture, the details of which can be found here: heritageopendays.org.uk. I had optimistically drawn up a list of interesting places that I wanted to go to last weekend but, as usual, things happened and we never got there. We did, however, manage a visit to the Norman church at nearby St Margarets-at-Cliffe. It is thought to have been built in 1136 and has remained largely unaltered since then.

I am hoping that we will get the opportunity to visit some more Heritage Open Day events around Deal this coming weekend.

On this 10th anniversary of the blog, I decided to start a ‘Moth of the Week’ spot and that the first moth featured was going be the lovely dusky thorn. There are nine different thorn moth species in the UK, all of which distinctively hold their wings up when at rest.

But no sooner had I chosen the dusky thorn as moth of the week, than he got toppled from his perch by Dave’s discovery of an absolute colossus of a moth – the convolvulus hawk-moth. In preparation for a visit by BT, he was hacking back the hedge around a telegraph pole that they will want to go up:

This clearing work exposed the moth that, up until then, had been resting ten feet up the pole, covered by the dense vegetation. The wingspan of this moth can be up to twelve centimetres which is bigger than any hawk-moth we had ever seen before:

They have enormously long tongues and are able to feed from flowers that no other British moth is able to access:

Their favoured flower to feed on is Nicotiana and many moth-lovers grow this tobacco plant in their gardens specifically to try to attract them. This is something I too will be attempting next year, although I read that these plants like full sun but moist soil, which will be a struggle on our free draining chalk.

Since we were responsible for it no longer being safely hidden, we rescued the moth and released it in the dark when the birds had roosted.

Some of the older hedgerows surrounding the meadows are now largely composed of ivy which, in September, has its moment of glory when it comes into flower. This represents a lifeline to invertebrates at a time when most other flowers in the meadows are flagging.

Red admiral butterflies on the ivy last September:

And common blue, box bug and common carder bee this week:

Unlike the others, the box bug is not after the pollen but uses the ivy as shelter.

Ivy bees, Colletes hederae, time their emergence into the world as adults to coincide with this September ivy flowering. They only collect ivy pollen, although they may visit other flowers for nectar.

There are countless thousands of ivy bees working the hedgerows here at the moment and, on a sunny calm day, the sound of their buzzing fills the air.

At night, it is moths rather than bees that are working the pollen. We went out with torches and found eight different species, including this old lady on the left and angle shades on the right:

There were many vine weevils on the ivy in the dark too:

These weevils are mating now and their grubs will develop over the winter. They are actually a bit of a nuisance here because our plant pots are places of safety for these grubs where their predators can’t reach them. They live off the roots of the plants and will eventually kill them, so we regularly treat the pots with the nematode Steinernema kraussei as a biological control. Experience over the years has also taught us that we just can’t grow their most favoured plants, such as Heuchera, in pots here because the weevils always get them in the end.

There were also earwigs on the ivy in the dark. I realised that I didn’t know much about earwigs and it turns out they are fascinating things. Most unusually among insects, earwigs show maternal care to their offspring. The female stays with her eggs in the soil and keeps them clean of fungal spores by licking them. Once the young hatch, she continues to remain with them and protects them until they can look after themselves.

But the most flabbergasting thing I found out is that they can fly! They do this only rarely but have two pairs of wings and the hind ones are intricately folded like complicated origami:

I find myself feeling more favourably towards earwigs now that I know a bit more about them.

One of the pear trees in the orchard is under close observation:

The foxes love pears and have previously gone to great lengths to get at the fruit. Or perhaps I should say that they have gone to great heights because they have climbed high up into the tree:

I would love to know if this was just a one-off or if they will do it again. This year the fruit is fast disappearing, but it hasn’t yet reached the point when all the lower pears have gone. It is surely only then that the foxes will ascend up into the tree if they are going to.

Jays, crows and magpies are busy pecking at the pears all over the tree…

…and badgers are hoovering up below:

The foxes, though, are reaching up onto their hind legs to pluck the pears off the tree:

I have many photos of this because it has been a good pear year:

This leap into the air made me laugh:

And here is a fox caught red-handed with a pear:

It is worth mentioning that windfall apples are lying on the ground untouched – it is only the pears that the foxes are after.

The female kestrel continues to regularly hunt in the meadows. She has caught something in her right talon here although I can’t work out what it is. She certainly does eat a lot of invertebrates but this is possibly a small reptile or amphibian:

And it is very unusual to see two kestrels together in the meadows:

So I have now entered the second decade of writing this blog. The astounding discovery that earwigs can fly and finding that supersized hawk-moth up a telegraph pole has been a great start. What will we find out to amaze and enthral us next?

We were back in Dorset last weekend for the wedding of our son Jonny. He was getting married at Smedmore House near Kimmeridge, in the heart of the World Heritage Jurassic Coast famed for its fossils.

Although I didn’t have much time for natural history investigation while I was there, this disused wasp nest was certainly very impressive:

On the day after the wedding, a group of us guests walked from the house down to Kimmeridge Bay. The owner of Smedmore House built the Clavell Tower on the estate in 1831 as a folly and observatory.

However, by 2006, the tower was in imminent danger of toppling into the sea as the cliff it stood on eroded. It was saved by the wonderful Landmark Trust who now own it:

In the Second World War, Kimmeridge Bay was a potential weak point in our coastal defences and reinforced concrete pill boxes were positioned here in 1940:

Another pillbox is sliding slowly down the beach. The anti-tank dragon’s teeth were to hinder access up the gully

Just as we arrived down at Kimmeridge Bay, the PS Waverley sailed by:

Before returning to Kent, we called in to the Etches Collection Museum in Kimmeridge village. Dave in the background gives some indication of the size of this enormous Pliosaur skull, the most complete that has been discovered to date:

This image of a different Pliosaur species, Pliosaurus funkei, gives some idea of what these animals looked like. (image by ДиБгд  CCA-SA 4.0 International)

We returned home to find that the badgers had been carrying out some major excavations themselves:

I have a camera pointing at this tunnel entrance and had hoped to see some action shots of this digging, but all I got was a straw-covered badger:

Autumn is a time when birds of prey gather in the meadows and we have had an exciting new arrival:

A buzzard has returned to the meadows to hunt:

The amount of white on a buzzard can vary greatly and, when I compare this buzzard to the one from last year, shown below, I wonder if it is in fact the same bird:

The ringed kestrel is also still here:

… and she continues to be bothered by the resident magpies:

Below is a magpie that has caught itself a large and juicy hawkmoth caterpillar:

Sparrowhawks are a constant presence in the meadows:

And a tawny owl was on the gate this week:

A weasel has been seen on this same gate:

John and John have been back ringing birds in the meadows and on one of their sessions they ringed seven species of warbler. Almost without exception the warblers are young birds, born this year. The theory is that the adults fly straight on across the sea without first stopping at the coast. John sent me some of his photos from the successful day:

Common whitethroat and reed warbler made up the seven warbler species they ringed that day.

Whilst they were in the meadows John and John spotted a sloe shieldbug (also called a hairy shieldbug, Dolycoris baccarum) which is a new species for the meadows:

One of the Johns is now off to visit his son and family in Western Australia, where the local beach has this interesting warning sign up:

There may not be any further bird ringing now until he returns in late October.

Birding is always thrilling in the autumn when the birds are on the move. But I have now discovered that there is also much excitement in the mothing world at this time, when immigrant moths can turn up in the trap.

The temperatures may now have dropped but, over in the wood, the tawny owls are still often bathing in the shallow ponds:

This next photo shows some highly unusual behaviour. This is a dormouse coming down for a drink at one of the woodland pools:

I finish this week with the giraffes at Wingham Wildlife Park near Canterbury where we went this week to celebrate our little granddaughter’s first birthday.

Now all of a sudden it seems to be mid-September and it is time to start cutting the meadows. But, depressingly, the weather forecast seems to suggest that there will be either rain or strong winds everyday for the next week or so and there may need to be a delay in the proceedings. This is frustrating but we shall have to see what happens.

This August we had been watching a wasp spider at work in the meadows, efficiently catching and despatching her prey. Then, one day, she disappeared from her web. In our somewhat limited experience it is not until early September that these spiders leave their webs for the last time and construct an egg cocoon nearby before dying. But perhaps our spider had been eaten by a bird? They do mimic wasps as protection, but they are big spiders with a body length of up to 20mm and would make a very nutritious snack for a bird.

We managed to find another wasp spider nearby to watch instead for a while, until she too disappeared. This set us off hunting systematically through the grasses to see if we could find a third one to observe. We had only ever seen a maximum of four wasp spiders in previous years but we hoped we might be lucky. Well, it turned out that we were indeed in luck because we found a further 147!

I am not sure if it is a particularly good year for these spiders or if we just hadn’t looked well enough before. One thing is for sure, we now have our eyes in for where to find them – they need a bit of air space, such as around a woody plant or in a natural cup in the grass as here:

Wasp spiders, Argiope bruennichi, originated in Mediterranean regions but have gradually spread across Europe and were first discovered in the UK around Rye in Sussex in 1922. Since then they have advanced over the south of England and are also edging northwards.

The webs are placed low to the ground in tall grasses, all the better to catch invertebrates such as grasshoppers and flies. Sometimes the spider does such brisk business that she has more than one prey item in her web at a time. In this eventuality, she will wrap them up to immobilise them and then hang them at the edges of her web until she has time to deal with them:

She wraps prey extremely fast because multiple strands of silk come out of her spinneret at the same time:

We will start to cut the meadows next month and our normal practice would be to leave the grasses around a wasp spider web to protect her egg cocoon. But this year we are going to have to have a rethink because there are wasp spider webs over much of the meadows and we can’t leave it all uncut.

Our son and daughter-in-law visited last weekend along with two of their friends who are entomologists. One of them is particularly fond of beetles and found this large weevil under a tile:

But unusually there was also a weevil in the moth trap this week. It is a peculiar looking thing with its antennae emerging halfway down its long snout, or rostrum. It is either an acorn weevil (Curculio glandium) or a nut weevil (Curculio nucum). To tell the difference I’d have needed to get a better look at the end of its antennae:

I am continuing to get good-sized catches of moths in the trap. This beautiful moth is the blood-vein and is one of my favourites:

But it was the Portland ribbon wave below the was the moth highlight of the week. Although this species breeds in Dorset, it is a rare immigrant elsewhere in the country. There were only four records of this moth in Kent last year, yet I had four of them in my trap this week:

There is always a lot of wild carrot, Daucus carota, growing in the meadows and the flowers are much loved by insects:

Once the flowers go over, spiky seeds start to form and the heads close up into a ball:

They form protective purses, offering sanctuary for all sorts of interesting things

There is so much wild carrot in the meadows that these seed heads become quite a feature of the ecosystem at this time of year:

Our visitors started gently prising some of these seed heads open to see what could be found within. The caterpillars of the carrot seed moth, Sitochroa palealis, develop in these protected areas. On the left below is a young caterpillar, and an older and darker one on the right:

I have noticed this adult carrot seed moth around the meadows this summer:

Last year I found a different caterpillar in the seed head although I don’t know what it is:

Our daughter-in-law also found us a new species of ladybird for the meadows in one of the seed heads

There are always lots of small spiders to be found in there too, such as this tiny Xysticus crab spider:

Once the wild carrot seeds fully ripen, flocks of goldfinch will arrive in the meadows to start feasting on them and I am looking forward to that:

Both Johns were back bird-ringing in the meadows on Bank Holiday Monday, although very few birds were around. They hypothesize that the clear skies and gentle winds meant that the migrant birds had taken advantage of the lovely conditions and flown straight over the Channel to France. They did ring this young blackcap though:

As they waited in vain for some birds to turn up, they took a photo of a pair of mating migrant hawker dragonflies on the net pole:

A way to tell that these are migrant hawkers is that glass of white wine just behind the wings and in the middle of the photo below:

One of the trees in the orchard has two stems of different pear varieties grafted onto a single trunk. The Doyenné du Comice pears ripen first, and earlier in August this half of the tree was heavy with gorgeous-looking fruit:

We were looking forward to harvesting them until Dave noticed that they had in fact all disappeared. One lonely Doyenné du Comice remained on the tree:

Where had they all gone? We suspect we know the answer to this because we have these extraordinary photos of this tree from a few years ago:

I was sorry to have lost the fruit, but I was much more upset to have missed the opportunity of getting further photos like this of our arboreal foxes.

However, there are still plenty of conference pears left on the other half of the tree, although these are rock hard at the moment. I have diverted three trail cameras across to keep the tree under close observation because, once they start to ripen, the foxes will no doubt be after these too:

So sadly there were no lovely ripe pears remaining, but our visitors picked some of the apples and processed a mixture of eating and cooking apples to produce some deliciously intense apple juice:

I always like to think of our hedgerow fruit being there to help the birds through the hungry times ahead. But there is so much this year that they also collected some sloes, rose hips and blackberries to take home with them:

They accompanied us on the August tour round the dormouse boxes in the wood last weekend too when I hoped to be able to show them a dormouse. We found seven of these lovely animals in total:

The highlight was finding a family in box 28. The eyes of this little one were only half open so it was around 18 days old:

The schools are back next week and the season is fast drawing to a close. It has been a long and memorable summer but now we’re happily looking forward to the joys of autumn. Soon the meadows will be having their annual cut, the bird ringers will be here catching exciting birds and the woodcock will be making their way back to the wood for winter.

With the bird breeding season now largely over for another year, many warblers have started their migration south. John, one of the bird ringers, spent a morning in the meadows hoping to catch and ring a few of them as they moved through. He was pleased to get three species of warbler:

As normal, all these are young birds that have fledged this year. It is thought that the adult birds fly straight over to France without stopping and don’t end up in the bird ringers’ net.

John also sent me some photos he took while he was ringing in the wood recently. This is the wing of a juvenile great spotted woodpecker that was caught on 17th July. All the primary flight feathers are splayed out here and can be seen to be a bit tatty and less solidly black than the secondary feathers, which are bunched up and closer to the bird’s body. He can tell that all these primaries – comprising both the longer and the shorter feathers – are still juvenile feathers:

Because the bird was now ringed, he could tell that he had caught it again twelve days later on 29th July. Once more he has splayed out the primary flight feathers:

This time, although the longer primary feathers are still the juvenile feathers that the bird grew in the nest, the shorter of the primaries are now the smart, blacker adult feathers. So in just twelve days these feathers have been shed and seamlessly replaced. It is easy to think that bird ringing is only about putting a ring on a bird’s leg, but so much other important data about the birds age and status is being logged and reported as well.

The tail of the great spotted woodpecker is also interesting. The central shafts of the tail feathers are thick and sturdy giving the bird a really stiff tail. This is useful since it uses its tail as a third point of contact against the tree trunk, forming a stable tripod.

A photo of a green woodpecker in the meadows this week shows the young bird on a perch. That stiff tail is so adapted to pushing against the trunk of a tree that, when there is no trunk, it looks most uncomfortable:

The feathers of this tawny owl in the wood all look a bit of a mess in comparison to the woodpeckers:

Last weekend I attended a study day at Tyland Barn, the Kent Wildlife Trust headquarters near Maidstone. The class was on the identification, biology and ecology of bumblebees, led by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

The course was for intermediates but we ran through the Big Seven common bumblebees anyway. I was grateful for the recap because I’ve always found bumblebees difficult:

Cuckoo bees and the rarer bumblebees were also covered in some detail. It was all completely fascinating and I learned a lot – now I’ve just got to remember it and put it into practice.

It tends to be the long-tongued bee species that are struggling in the UK. These bees are constrained by needing flowers with long tubular shapes to be able to feed. When I got back from the study day, Dave and I had a think about how we could introduce more long-tongued bee-friendly plants both into the garden and native plant species into the meadows.

The ruderal bumblebee, Bombus ruderatus, is a rare bee with a long tongue that we saw in Walmer Castle grounds back in June. It was feeding on Stachys, or lamb’s tongue:

In fact the Stachys had all sorts of invertebrates using it and it seems to be a bit of a garden superstar. I subsequently planted three Stachys plants in the garden here, but I’m now wondering if this is enough.

We have a giant echium, Echium pininana, growing in the garden most years. This dramatic biennial puts up flower spikes that are over three metres tall, forming a skyscraper mass of small purple trumpet-shaped flowers. It flowers for months and is very popular with bees:

It’s a fantastic resource for all sorts of pollinators but I don’t think its trumpet flowers are deep enough for the rare long-tongued bumblebees:

Out in the meadows there is already a lot of knapweed and a large area of comfrey in the allotment – both of these plants have tubular flowers. But we think there could certainly be more honeysuckle scrambling over our hedgerows and we will plant some plugs this autumn.

The ringed female kestrel has returned to the meadows and we are seeing her every day:

She was ringed here as a young bird in September 2019 and is now six years old:

We feel so honoured that she is still here in the meadows all these years later.

So far this year I have only seen her eating insects. She has something like a bumblebee in her right claw here:

And I think this must be another great green bush-cricket in her left foot here:

There has also been another sighting of a male kestrel with his grey head:

The kestrels continue to be bothered by magpies who don’t want them hunting here:

And on the subject of magpies, this one appears to have two mice in its beak at the same time:

The fox with the broken leg comes up close to the house as dusk approaches and waits for me to emerge with the peanuts

He has to try to get in quickly because once the badgers arrive they tend to chase the foxes away:

Dave thinks they look like the Romans, who also used to feast lying down:

Now that I have my new battery-powered moth trap, I was really keen to run it in the wood to see if I could catch some woodland specialists:

However, I made a mistake in its placement. When we returned to the wood the next morning, the picnic table was already in dappled sunlight and the moths were far too warm and active. As soon as I started to look at them they flew away, which was very frustrating.

There was this handsome black arches moth remaining though, which is a moth that lives in woodland and I had never come across it before:

I will try again with the moth trap in the wood soon, this time placing it somewhere that will be in cool heavy shade the next morning.

Since the visit of the Kent micro moth recorder last week, I have been paying much more attention to the micros. I always used to largely ignore them on the basis that they were too numerous and mostly too difficult. When I ran the trap in the meadows this week, there was a large catch including many micro species which I worked through and tried to identify as best I could. I really wish I’d got a better photo of this one before letting it go because it’s a rare little thing:

My final photo for today is of ‘Her Ladyship’ – the wasp spider that has her web woven amongst the grasses of the meadows. She is a grasshopper specialist but we still haven’t seen her catch any of these. She is mostly doing a brisk business in flies but here she has something a bit different:

She has caught herself a dragonfly and you can see the packaged up wings in the big ball of web, with the body arching over the top. As always with spiders this is macabre but strangely fascinating all wrapped up into one.

I am now the proud owner of a battery-powered moth trap which will allow me to catch and report moths even when far away from a power source:

The trap has a 20W actinic light – a fluorescent tube that is high in UV and manufactured primarily to attract insects in the catering trade. The instructions for the battery, however, tell you to recharge it even if you’ve only done nine holes, so must be used mostly for golf. But it is small and powerful and can keep the moth trap bulb alight for ten hours. The control box on the trap has a light sensor, so everything will efficiently leap into action automatically at dusk and go off again at dawn.

I had wanted a mobile moth trap for ages, mainly to investigate what moths live in the wood, but was unsure of which system to buy. It was only when the Micro Moth Recorder for Kent come to visit the meadows this week, and I had a chance to talk to him about it, that I had the confidence to take the plunge.

I had run my old moth trap on the night before his visit and he was happy to go through the catch with me. This was a golden opportunity to learn from an expert rather than puzzle over things on my own and I found it extremely helpful. There are several types of moth that I struggle to identify and always used to just ignore. The plume group of moths is an example of one of these:

In fact I have run the moth trap on three nights this week. There have been a lot Jersey tigers:

There have also been gypsy moths in the trap. This is another moth that is quite newly arrived in the UK, although this one is far less welcome:

There is often a bycatch to be found in the moth trap. The cockchafer is an amazing beast:

And it too has noteworthy antennae:

Ophion wasps are attracted to light and also regularly turn up in the trap, although they are difficult to identify down to species:

Two young birds have been entertaining us in the meadows this week. The first is a kestrel:

The second young bird is a recently-fledged green woodpecker, which has also been bouncing around in our front garden, as well as appearing on many of the trail cameras:

Now that it is August, lesser knapweed and wild carrot are the dominant flowers amongst the grasses of the meadows:

It is also an extremely good berry year. The hawthorns and blackthorn are groaning with fruit:

The hawthorn berries in particular are extremely popular with the birds and this is always the first of the hedgerow fruit to disappear:

The female kestrel that was ringed in the meadows as a young bird in September 2019 is back and regularly hunting here. Is she the mother of the young kestrel now in the meadows? I hope so. Although her diet will be mostly rodents, we have also seen her with bumblebees, dragonflies and lizards over the years. She especially seems to have a taste for the great green bush crickets that hop and fly around the meadows in August:

In fact we caught one of these crickets ourselves this week and photographed her before she was released back into the long grasses:

As the adult kestrel patiently waits for her prey to reveal itself, she often gets bothered by magpies who take exception to her being here:

It is unusual to see a male kestrel in the meadows but one did come for a bath this week:

We always like to try to spot wasp spiders in the meadows in August and we found one this week:

These large spiders are grasshopper specialists, but here she has caught herself a flesh fly. You can see its red eyes under the web that the spider has wrapped around it:

Now that we know where this spider is, the grasses won’t be cut this year in a wide circle around her. This is to preserve the cocoon of eggs that she will soon be constructing somewhere close to her web and within which the next generation will overwinter.

John, one of the bird ringers, has spent a few recent mornings ringing in the wood. Although he understandably finds it difficult to take a photo on his phone whilst holding a bird in the other, he has sent me a photo of an adult marsh tit that he caught this week:

But we know that they breed in our wood because last May we found a family of them in a dormouse box:

John also sent me a photo of a sweet young robin that is going through a moult and now has a mix of adult and juvenile plumage:

I am no good at identifying fungi but this is a beautiful specimen that we found already knocked over in the wood:

The marjoram clearing is a riot of vegetation at this time of year with dogwood, rosebay willow herb and marjoram all jostling for space. The intense concentration of flowering plants within a woodland setting makes it a really special place:

On a sunny day it is heaving with invertebrates. White admirals and silver-washed fritillaries are both big, woodland-specialist butterflies that live there:

There were many other species of butterfly that love the marjoram too. Here a comma demonstrates how it got its name:

Gatekeepers are easily distinguished with those double white spots within the black spot on their wings:

Even a hummingbird hawkmoth has found its way through the trees to reach the marjoram in the clearing:

This fly is quite an amazing sight, although my photos aren’t fantastic. Look at that strangely long skinny waist:

A great many hoverflies were also visiting the flowers, including some very large and thankfully easy-to-identify ones such as this pellucid hoverfly, Volucella pellucens:

Scorpion flies, Panorpa communis, are extraordinary-looking things that feed on scavenged insects and we see lots of them every year in the clearing:

Now that it is August, I am finishing this week with the annual agapanthus photo. Situated at the threshold to the meadows, this plant looks spectacular set against the yellowing seed heads of the grasses at this time of year:

It is very nearly ten years since tentatively launching my first ever Walmermeadows post on 15th September 2015 and I have probably posted a photo of this agapanthus every August since then – it has become something of a tradition.

I am pleased to see that this year’s photo shows the agapanthus surrounded by lovely green grass. At one point earlier this summer I had thought we were heading in the same direction as 2022 when the annual agapanthus photo looked very different indeed:

But thank goodness it has rained this summer, keeping the vegetation alive for all the invertebrates to successfully complete their lifecycles so that they can reemerge next year for us all to enjoy.

For the last few weeks I have been observing a family of swifts as they nested in a box attached to the side of the house. The pair of adults arrived back from Africa on 5th May and spent some time settling in and recovering before laying two eggs on 22nd and 24th May. These then hatched on 11th June, just as we were going in holiday. On our return, however, we found that there had been a major hiccup and there was only one adult left bringing up the young.

One chick did seem to be larger than the other, though, and on 20th July this one spent the day flapping its wings and readying itself to leave:

By the evening of the 20th the bigger chick had launched itself out into the big wide world, leaving its sibling alone in the box for the very first time. The parent returned from its foraging to spend that night with its remaining chick:

The parent went off again the next morning and the chick spent 21st July on its own, peering anxiously out of the hole:

Last year both chicks had fledged within a day of each other, so I was expecting the second chick to soon be on its way. But it resolutely stayed in the box.

I started to worry about it and was frequently checking the camera. My concern increased significantly when the parent failed to return to the box in the evening and the chick spent the second night after its sibling fledged alone:

Throughout the next day there was no further sign of the parent, however often I looked at the camera, and I spent the day agitated and with a feeling of helplessness. Therefore, it was with immense relief that I saw that the parent had eventually returned towards dusk and spent the third night after the fledging back in the box with its chick:

Still the young bird stayed in the box and the parent then spent the fourth night post-fledging with its remaining offspring.

Now we have reached the 24th July in the story, four days after the first chick fledged. At 6.30am the parent bird and its chick are staring out of the hole together and I imagine the young bird getting a pep talk to give it the confidence to launch itself into the rest of its life:

And then they were finally off! When I next checked the box half an hour later, they had both gone and it was empty:

As happened last year, the adult returned for one more night – which was last night – on its own in the box and I believe that our swift year has now come to an end.

All that remains to show that it ever happened is a beautifully tidy, feathery nest in the box and a pile of the chicks’ faecal sacks taken out of the box by the parent and then immediately dropped onto the flat roof below:

Perhaps the lengthy four day delay in the fledging of the second chick was because the good weather broke after the first chick left. We have had several episodes of thunderous rain over the last few days, turning the dog into a shaking, panting wreck hiding under the table.

Having had such a dry, hot first half of the summer I had been concerned about the water levels in the ponds but they are probably alright now – still low for sure, but no longer in danger of drying out:

The badgers must be pleased with all this rain, bringing the worms that should be 70% of their diet up to the surface of the soil:

But the bees definitely prefer the sunshine:

It does look like the fruit trees in the orchard liked all that heat as well, and both the apple and the pear trees are heavily laden. There is going to be a bumper harvest later this summer and I currently don’t have the freezer space for it:

One autumn a few years ago the foxes helped us out with this potential problem by climbing into the pear trees and eating the fruit themselves:

They also like rabbit and here is a fox this week launching itself at one:

As the summer draws to a close, the badgers will start making their quarters winter-ready by dragging multiple loads of dry vegetation backwards into their sett. But, for now, this badger decided that just one small mouthful was what it needed:

Never have I seen such fluffy crow. I presume that this must be one of the young ones:

And this one too – that tutu looks ridiculous:

A sparrowhawk starts to peck at its small bird prey as one of the magpies, the self-appointed policemen of the meadows, looks on:

Lovely to continue to see barn owls back once more in the meadows:

Two or three weeks ago we heard a turtle dove purring in a holm oak down by the wild pond and I put a couple of extra cameras out to see if it would come down to the water. Unfortunately we haven’t seen the turtle dove but one of the cameras has captured a much bigger bird instead:

I have had some time this week to skip out into the meadows with my macro camera and catch up with what the invertebrates are up to out there.

I was amazed by this thing, especially when I saw those big eyes and realised that it was a fly:

This is the conopid fly Conops quadrifasciatus ( the four-banded bee grabber) and I’m afraid to say that it has a bit of a gruesome but interesting lifecycle. This is a female fly and she will lay her eggs directly into the abdominal cavities of adult bumblebees, especially the red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius. The bees are usually intercepted in flight, with the conopid grabbing the bee with its long legs and wrestling with it while they fall to the ground. The odd shape of the end of the fly’s abdomen allows her to prise apart the abdominal segments of the bee allowing an egg to be inserted.

Once the egg hatches, the fly larva eats the bee from the inside, eventually killing it. But before the bee dies, the conopid larva within causes the bee to dig itself down into the soil. The fly then pupates underground where it is protected from the weather and predation. After overwintering, the adult conopid hatches from the pupa and digs its way up to the surface.

There are a lot of red-tailed bumblebees, the favoured host of this four-banded bee-grabber, in the meadows at the moment:

As well as the fascinating conopid fly, I also found two species of Cerceris digger wasps:

This tiny gall fly, Urophora quadrifasciata, is only 2-3mm long but has wonderfully marked wings:

There is a lot of dragonfly and damselfly action down at the ponds at the moment. Here is a male emperor, the UK’s largest dragonfly:

And here is a female emperor laying her eggs into the water:

I had another good haul of moths when I ran the trap this week, including some absolute beauties. The plumed fan-foot with his wonderful antennae on the left below was a new moth for me and I am very fond of the rosy footmen and magpie moths on the right.

I also haven’t seen a bee moth before:

It has been a wonderful year for six-spot burnet moths:

And there are a lot of butterflies around as well:

Butterfly Conservation’s The Big Butterfly Count is on at the moment and I am hoping that they will discover that it has been a good year for butterflies in general because they could definitely do with some better news.

We were hoping to find some families of dormice in July’s tour round the boxes in the wood. But, although we did find five solitary dormice and six additional empty dormouse nests in the fifty nest boxes, none of them had been used for breeding.

The marjoram in the large clearing in the wood is out in full flower now and is thronging with life. As we walked through it, a silver-washed fritillary glided across in front of us and stopped us in our tracks:

One beautiful summer evening we went for a late dog walk at Sandwich Bay. I was very charmed by a small family who crossed the road in front of us:

The mother pheasant goes across the road followed by her three small chicks:

I am not aware of pheasants being released into the countryside for shooting in our area and believe that these birds are part of a wild population. They were so very sweet as they anxiously tried to keep up with her:

I think these little chicks are sure to bring a smile to anyone’s face and to brighten up the worst of days.

Two extraordinary things happened on Thursday. Firstly, there was a photo of a juvenile cuckoo on one of the trail cameras:

However, this year’s cuckoo stayed around here for two or three days and has now been pictured on every perch that we have. Here are a few of the photos:

But the bird has now gone on its way, heading off over the Channel and further on south to Africa. By the time it returns next spring, it will be in its adult plumage which is distinctly less spotty and with a grey head, as seen in this photo from Wiki Commons:

The second surprising thing that happened on Thursday is that The King landed in the field next to the meadows to pay a visit to Walmer and Deal.

He visited Walmer Castle, the Walmer RNLI, helped with a beach clean and a few other things as well over the course of the day:

He then returned to his helicopter, which flew low directly over the meadows as it departed:

All in all, it was a very memorable day.

Other things that have been going on in the meadows this week:

A tawny owl has been successfully hunting:

And a barn owl has been seen again after quite a long absence:

Several pairs of stock doves have bred in the meadows this summer…

…and it looks like they are planning on fitting in another brood as well:

Somewhere in the hedgerows, some woodpigeon eggs have hatched. The parent will fly away with the broken egg so as not to advertise where the nest is:

I was so pleased to see the ringed kestrel back in the meadows because she hasn’t been spotted for ages and I was worrying about her:

Magpies, on the other hand, are always very much in evidence:

Once we get to high summer and winged ants take to the skies, black-headed gulls start ‘anting’ in the meadows:

The single-parent family of swifts in the nest box attached to the house continue to do well. This photo was taken at 5am but already the parent bird had gone off to catch food:

One of the swiftlets peering out of the box:

Our new thermal imaging camera shows a lovely orange glow at the end of one of the smaller swift boxes, as evidence that a second pair of swifts are still roosting in there to claim it as their own:

One of the foxes here has presumably broken his leg because he has been unable to put any weight on it for many months. He is the most enthusiastic partaker of the nightly peanuts and has taken to coming quite close to the house at dusk to wait for me:

Here he is around the meadows hopping along on three legs:

This is a different fox but I love the photo:

I am once again getting bitten by Campyloneura virgula, a tiny predatory mirid bug:

Campyloneura virgula mainly eats small invertebrates such as aphids and mites, using its piercing mouthparts to extract fluids from its prey. Whilst they are known to bite humans, the reason for this behaviour is still unknown.

A Kite-tailed robberfly, Machimus atricapillus, in the meadows:

This was a new day-flying moth to be spotted here, Sitochroa palealis:

It seems to be a very good year for another day-flyer, the six-spot burnet moth:

There also seem to be many more hoverflies around this year than normal:

The grass snake is still hanging around the new pond in the wood:

And the recently-fledged green woodpeckers love this shallow pool:

A pair of stock doves have nested in the tawny owl box this summer. This is lovely, but obviously not as good as if tawnies nested:

Last weekend we stayed in a large old farmhouse in Wiltshire with our children and their partners to attend the wedding of our nephew and his new wife:

A bush cricket was on our daughter’s windscreen as they set off from Crouch Hill in London to make their way to Wiltshire. Over the course of the journey down the M4 it slowly worked itself back along the car until it was on the rear windscreen by the time they arrived at the farmhouse two or three hours later. I’m afraid that it is now going to have to make a new home for itself in Wiltshire. I wonder how much wildlife is transported around the country in this way?

The view out over the Marlborough Downs from the front door of the farmhouse was simply breath-taking:

We returned from the wedding at 9.15pm on Saturday just as dusk was gathering. But we were stopped in our tracks at the sight of hundreds of swifts filling the sky above the house as they fitted in one last feed before it got dark. We lay on our backs on the lawn in our wedding finery to watch the spectacle. Never have I even come close to seeing such a large group of swifts and it was a completely unforgettable wildlife moment at the end of a long, hot day.