In the ten years that we have lived in East Kent, more and more south-facing slopes have been planted up with vines as wine production in the area has blossomed. These days there are more than fifty commercial vineyards in Kent and, with similar soils to the Champagne region in France, it is sparkling wines using the traditional méthode champenoise that they are particularly known for. Two of our children are very interested in wine and have just passed their Wine and Spirit Education Trust level 3 exams. They were staying with us over Easter, so we all visited Gusbourne near Romney Marsh for a wine tasting and vineyard tour.

Spring frosts that would damage the fresh new buds are a worry at this time of year and the vineyard has some of these frost protection fans, imported from the Napa Valley in California:

Lots of pots were hanging from the hedgerow around the vines. These are apparently to monitor the levels of the Suzuki fly in the area:

The Suzuki fly, Drosophila suzukii, is a native of SE Asia but is now established in Britain and poses a significant threat for our soft fruit growers including vineyards. In contrast to other Drosophila species that only infest rotting fruit, this fly lays her eggs into the ripening grape using her saw-like ovipositor to get in under the skin. The fly larvae then develop within the grape, ruining it for winemaking.

It was interesting to learn that the vines will generally be planted on south-facing slopes with the rows orientated north-south so that they don’t shade each other. When the individual plants are pruned, a single shoot is left, also reaching towards the south if possible. Often this single stem will be on a ‘watershoot’ coming directly up from the roots as in the photo below. When the main rootstock eventually gets old and needs replacing, it is cut away leaving the watershoot as the stem.

Gusbourne is a relatively new Kent vineyard since the first vines were only planted in 2004. But their wines are already highly acclaimed, often winning awards, and we very much enjoyed tasting them.

Back in the meadows, we are pleased that the badger cub is being brought straight up into the meadows rather than onto the cliff, because this is giving us some unimpeded views of the sweet little thing:

The cub is not yet allowed up for long and stays close to its mother:

She is not bringing it to the peanuts with the other adult badgers at the moment:

There are three adult badgers living in the meadows, the original parents and one of last years cubs:

This is a ridiculous photo of two of them lounging around whilst still eating the peanuts:

We have now discovered a second fox family, this one somewhere on the densely vegetated cliff:

There has been a lot of food being taken in. Whilst most of it is unidentifiable, I can see that this is a fish:

And this is surely a rat:

And we have had early sightings of one of the little cubs of this family:

Another mammal being frequently seen in the meadows at the moment is the weasel. I have been looking closely at this next photo in case there is evidence that this is a lactating female, because wouldn’t it be amazing to see weasel cubs?

The bird ringers have done two more sessions with the whoosh net in the meadows and are very pleased with the number of linnets they have caught.

Yellowhammers are also coming down to the seed at the whoosh net but so far have evaded being captured:

A redstart was on the trail cameras as well this week, no doubt newly arrived in the country and on its way inland to breed:

And this is our first common whitethroat of the year. Whitethroats do nest here and so I hope that this one will stay around:

Several starling are in the meadows at the moment and will also hopefully be nesting here. This bird is ringed as well:

As ever, sparrowhawks have been active in the meadows as evidenced by several piles of feathers. This one is taking a break from hunting to take a bath:

Nice to see a different kestrel here. This is a male with his grey head and the single, broad black stripe at the end of his tail. He has caught some prey although I’m not sure what that is:

The normal ringed female kestrel has been around as well. A photo of her from February shows how different her tail feathers are from that of the male:

The pair of mallards are still coming in for a very early morning swim whilst they are egg laying:

I carried out a rescue of a tawny mining bee trapped inside the house and took some quick photos before I released her:

Nice to properly see the three dots on the top of her head – these are her ocelli. They are simple eyes that can detect light and shadow, helping her to judge her direction relative to the sun and also to avoid predation:

A tawny mining bee nest like a mini volcano has appeared in the orchard:

There are a lot of celery flies, Euleia heraclei, around at the moment. They are amazing-looking little things:

These small things look like they have come straight out of a science fiction film:

There were several of these on some ivy leaves and I include a photo of a second one as well because it more clearly shows the shaving brush coming out of the end of the abdomen:

These nymphs will have developed into adult planthoppers by June:

We found a nest of brown-tip moth caterpillars in a hawthorn bush:

The brown-tip moth caterpillar is very impressive to look at but is covered in barbed hairs which will irritate human skin and means that most birds will leave them alone. However, cuckoos specialise in eating hairy caterpillars, including these brown-tips.

Green hairstreak butterflies have now appeared in the meadows. I am hoping that they will have a good year because we have seen so few here for the last two springs:

I was excited to see my first ever furrow bee on the sun-baked moat wall at Walmer Castle. I believe that this is the bronze furrow bee, Halictus tumulorum:

You can see the notch at the end of her abdomen that gives furrow bees their name:

In the wood, I think that I can now say that green woodpeckers are nesting in the same hole as last year. Perhaps it is the same pair but I cannot be sure:

I am looking forward to watching their progress as spring progresses.

In my experience it is a very rare occasion indeed for the wildlife here to perform as you want it to. Therefore, I was especially pleased when I managed to show our Easter visitors the enthralling spectacle of male smooth newts displaying to females in the pond.

The sun shone over Easter, the wind mostly stayed away and the fruit trees in the orchard were in glorious blossom, fit to stage the annual Easter egg hunt, which gets very competitive now that the children are adults. Our family is spread wide across the south of England and it’s so lovely to see them when they get the opportunity to travel to these outermost reaches of Kent.

As we approach the end of April, it shouldn’t be long now before swifts start arriving back in the UK to breed. As we wait with bated breath to see if our pair will make it back, my last photo for today is of the inside of the nest box where two swift chicks were successfully raised last year:

The box has come down from the wall this week for Dave to install a new and improved camera, but everything is now back in place and we are ready for them. I am keeping everything crossed for their safe return.

It has been some time since there has been any bird ringing in the meadows because John and John, the birdringers, have both been unwell. But thankfully they are now recovered sufficiently to start doing what they love again. This week John and another ringer Becky were in the meadows trying out an alternative way of catching birds to ring – whoosh netting:

There are now plans to do more whoosh netting in the meadows this coming week.

Meanwhile, somewhere tucked deep within the thorny hedgerow at the end of the meadows, a litter of fox cubs is being reared. This vixen is clearly feeding young and has been going in and out of the hedgerow:

She has also been taking small mammals in. I suppose this must be a rat:

The pressure is now on for the parent foxes. Not only do they need to feed themselves, they also have other hungry mouths to find food for. There is often plenty of potential fox prey around, but first they have to catch it:

I can now properly introduce you to this year’s single badger cub who was first allowed above ground on 11th April:

Some other interesting photos from the meadows this week:

Now that it is April, it is time to recommence the monthly monitoring tours around the dormouse boxes in the wood. This week we did the thirty boxes in our wood and I will do the twenty boxes in our neighbour’s wood with her next week. Male dormice are thought to emerge from hibernation two weeks before the females and in fact we did only find males this time. We found two of them, both in otherwise empty boxes – I suppose they have not yet had time to make any sort of nest for themselves:

Twelve of the thirty boxes were found to have tit nests in them, although only one clutch of eggs so far. Blue tits do only have one brood a year and they will have finished with the boxes by the end of May, leaving them available once more for dormice. In box 28, however, a wren had filled the box with moss:

I feel that there should be a drum roll before this next photo. This is the first time that I’ve ever caught a snake on a trail camera:

Sparrowhawks also come to this pond daily to bathe. However, like all the ponds in both the meadows and the wood, it is getting rather low on water – we do need some rain:

On 10th April there was still a redwing in the wood. I have noticed before that the redwings are always the last winter visitors to leave:

I finish this week with tulips. For several autumns now, I have been planting a hundred or so tulip bulbs in the allotment to use as cut flowers in the spring. However, I have had an ongoing problem with rats who view these bulbs as a good food source over the winter. The autumn before last I rolled the bulbs in chilli powder before planting which proved to be very effective at deterring the rats. Flushed with success, I repeated this last autumn as well. Although initially this approach seemed to be working again, towards the end of the winter I started to lose a lot of bulbs once more. I am guessing that the chilli had been washed away, allowing the rats to get going. Now, in April, although I do have still some lovely flowers to bring into the house, there are nowhere near as many as I had hoped.

Walmer Castle grows tulips at this time of year and they never seem to lose a single bulb:

Back in February, I noticed that, not only were the tulip beds at the Castle covered in a protective mesh, but a humane rat trap baited with bulbs was also being used:

This is something that I would not want to do and so have decided not to battle with the rats anymore. I will still plant some tulips into pots by the house this autumn but from now on there will be no more bulbs going out into the allotment. The rats will just have to find something different to eat this winter or perhaps, even better, go elsewhere.

We have been enjoying an extended spell of sunny, dry spring weather although, here on the cliffs overlooking the North Sea, this has often been accompanied by a strong and chilly north-easterly wind.

As part of the newly-formed volunteer wildlife monitoring team at Walmer Castle, we have been patrolling the Castle grounds once a week looking for signs of spring. This fox didn’t seem overly concerned about us:

The gardeners have managed to plant mistletoe onto the low fruit trees in the orchard, providing us with an opportunity to get a proper look at it. Mistletoe is a hemiparasite – although it can photosynthesise itself, it also takes water and nutrients from its host tree.

It is dioecious, having separate male and female plants. The flowers on the male plant on the left below produce pollen. The flowers of the female plant on the right will form into berries if they are pollinated by insects bringing that pollen across to them from a male plant.

A few berries still remain from last year:

The Castle’s moat has stone walls, providing ideal habitat for jumping spiders looking for prey to pounce on. We spotted two different species – I was already familiar with the zebra jumping spider, Salticus scenicus, because we get them in the meadows:

But the other jumping spider there was new to me. This spider was even smaller at only 2-3mm which presented a considerable photographic challenge:

We also saw a tawny mining bee in the Castle grounds. These bees will have spent the winter as pupae in their underground nests but now, in early April, they have triumphantly emerged as adults. The females are absolute stunners:

The meadows lie just to the south of the Castle and there are tawny mining bees here too. I do find bee identification difficult but think this next bee is a female yellow-legged mining bee, Andrena flavipes. She will have long yellow pollen-collecting hairs on the thighs of her hind legs, although these are covered in yellow pollen in this photo:

The next three photos are part of my ongoing project to get a half decent photo of a hairy-footed flower bee as she feeds from the pots of ‘shrimps on the barbie’ pulmonaria by the back door. The problem is that she is in constant motion, but I whacked the camera speed up to its highest setting to see what that would do.

A definite advance on last year’s efforts, but much room for improvement still.

As she approaches a flower she sticks out her mouthparts to probe into the flower:

Bee-flies, also sweet little things, like to visit the shrimps on the barbie flowers as well:

Dave took these mating dotted bee-flies on his camera phone. I had absolutely no idea that they went end-to-end like this. They can even fly around when they are joined up, with one of them having to fly backwards:

The first butterfly that hasn’t overwintered as an adult has appeared in the meadows. The speckled wood is the only British butterfly to hibernate both as a chrysalis and a caterpillar:

Other photos from the meadows this week:

At this time of year, I love to see the bee-flies feeding from the masses of primroses now flowering in the wood:

Sparrowhawks love this pond out in the open of the marjoram grove:

This next photo was taken in the very early morning when there was still dew on the camera lens, but I include it here anyway because it shows a pair of mallards that briefly stopped by. This is a new species for the wood:

A buzzard has once more been sitting by the tawny owl box that has nesting squirrels in it this year. Although buzzards mainly eat smaller mammals, they can and do eat squirrels as well:

Stock doves are hole nesters and a pair of these lovely birds have looked into the box to see if it was available for them. Unfortunately it wasn’t:

The hole in the old cherry tree hole continues to attract lot of interest. Nuthatch and great-spotted woodpecker here:

But it is the green woodpeckers that are now making the majority of visits to the tree:

You can just see a second green woodpecker on the other cherry tree as well:

Our wildlife monitoring tours of Walmer Castle grounds are usually rounded off with a cup of tea from the cafe. We like to sit up on the bastion, surrounded by cannons and with a view of the sea:

This week we were entertained by watching the lorries carrying shingle from the north end of the beach back down to the south again as part of the annual sea defence repairs:

This is a thankless task because it will soon be pushed back up again by a relentless sea. Beaches provide good defence against the sea because they take the damaging energy out of the waves – but the continual erosion of the beach around Kingsdown is leaving the houses there unprotected. This annual transportation of shingle to re-nourish Kingsdown beach to the south might seem bonkers but is currently considered to be the solution with the least harmful effect on the environment as well as being an economical one. Until a suitable alternative is found, it looks like we are destined to have these lorries driving up and down our beach every spring for the time being.

We have returned from ten days away to find Spring bursting out all around. It was a lovely holiday but I was relieved not to have missed the big newt event of the year when male smooth newts display to the females and try to wow them. I attempt to photograph this every year with varying degrees of success.

Sitting by the pond with my camera one late morning, it was only the males that were loafing around in the open water. They are in their breeding finery at this time of year and are certainly looking pretty spectacular. Every so often newts need to come to the surface to take a gulp of air, which gave me a chance to get a clearer photo:

But it’s difficult to do them justice photographically when they are in the pond.

In 2020 we briefly fished two males out so that we could get a better look at them:

They are very impressive animals. There can be a big difference in coloration, though. These newts below are both adult male smooth newts:

In this sunny late morning by the pond, the females were lurking under cover and trying not to attract any attention to themselves:

But when I returned to the pond at around 4.30pm, things had changed and what Dave very aptly dubbed ‘the cocktail hour’ was underway. The females were now out in the open and the males were pursuing them. What they were trying to do was to get in front of a female and then bend in half to wag their tails at them. They wanted to catch her eye and be the one chosen to fertilise her eggs.

The badgers have also been preparing themselves for spring. There has been a lot of old bedding pulled out:

And many loads of fresh bedding have been dragged in:

The tunnel entrance on the steep cliff has been busy with badger comings and goings:

I was excited to see this photo because the female’s tummy looks like she is suckling young:

Then, finally, there was unequivocal evidence that there is indeed a cub this year. The camera that looks along the path at the top of the cliff took a video of a cub being carried from one burrow to another:

This cub will officially be allowed above ground in mid April and we will get a chance to have a proper look at it then.

Throughout last year a buzzard regularly hunted in the meadows. In fact, in the autumn, it was here most days:

But then, in mid November, I was driving home along the busy A258 towards Deal and was about a mile from the meadows when I saw that the cars coming towards me were all queued up behind a shiny black hearse that had come to a standstill in the road. As I got closer, I realised that the hearse had stopped because a buzzard had just been run over in front of it and it was waiting for an opportunity to go round the enormous dead bird rather than over it. I had a horrible gut feeling that this was our buzzard, and indeed it surely was because the bird has not been seen in the meadows since.

It is estimated that thousands of buzzards are killed or injured on the UK roads every year, but at least this is from a population of around 70,000 pairs of birds. The situation is so much worse for barn owls – the Barn Owl Trust estimates that there are 4,000 pairs of barn owls in Britain, producing 12,000 young each year. However, it is horrifying to hear that 3,000 to 5,000 of these young birds are then killed on our major roads. I found this page on the Trust’s website very interesting: https://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/hazards-solutions/barn-owls-major-roads/. They advocate planting screens of trees at the sides of major road black spots to force the owls to fly higher.

I was so sorry to lose our buzzard late last year but, on one sunny spring morning, I saw two buzzards soaring in circles over the meadows and ran for my camera:

They were being mobbed by our resident crows and they weren’t around for long, but they represented the hope that perhaps one day there might be a buzzard back on our perches once more.

There have been signs of spring all around. A male stock dove displays to his female:

Both song thrushes and blackbirds have been singing heartily, and collecting wet leaves for their nests from this tiny pond:

And crows have been flying around with sticks:

This fox is clearly feeding cubs:

And it’s so good to see butterflies fluttering around in the sunshine once more. We’ve just seen peacocks and brimstones so far – both of which overwinter as adults and so can react more quickly to the warmer weather:

The buff-tailed bumblebee queens that have survived the winter are now looking for nest sites to start their family and visiting spring flowers to keep their energy up:

This particular bee was carrying some hitch-hiking mites, harmless to the bee but hoping to be transported to her new nest where they will clear up detritus for her:

There are so many things to eagerly anticipate in spring. But I absolutely do not look forward to the alexanders once more raising their heads above the parapet:

The whole of the coastal area here in East Kent has a bit of a problem with abundant alexander growth at this time of the year. They are big, vigorous plants that just do too well at the expense of many other things. Pollinators love them but they can’t be trusted to stay under control. For several years now we have been operating a zero tolerance policy of any alexander that is brave enough to try to flower here. There are far too many plants to dig them all up in one go, and so our approach is dig those up that start to flower. In this way every year we are digging a proportion of them up whilst never getting any new ones because no seed is spread.

What a difference five years has made. These next two photos are taken from the same place in March 2020 and March 2025. We have recently let a stand of blackthorn grow up which is blocking the view to the gate, but it’s very gratifying to see such an improvement in the alexander situation:

A few other photos from the meadows this week:

Over in the wood, another vixen is feeding cubs:

We may have lost the buzzard from the meadows but we do still see them in the wood. A buzzard sat on this branch for a while, and the squirrels that are nesting in the tawny owl box were wise enough to keep a very low profile whilst it was around:

We have positioned a camera to once more monitor the hole in a cherry tree where green woodpeckers nested last year. So far there have been several prospective tenants: nuthatch, great tits, green woodpecker and great-spotted woodpecker…

…but so far no one has fully committed themselves.

And finally this week I will hand over to a couple of my meadow friends to bid you farewell:

We like to get away with the dog in early spring and this year we headed west. We first stayed for a few nights in Lion Lodge, the gatehouse for Newark Park which is a National Trust property in Gloucestershire, built on the Cotswold escarpment with views out over the Severn Valley.

The prime reason for our stay in Gloucestershire was to catch up with our daughter who lives in Cheltenham. However, whilst we were there, we also wanted to visit the Golden Triangle. This is an area between the villages of Newent, Dymock and Kempley on the Gloucestershire/Herefordshire border where our British native daffodil grows wild and free. There used to be a lot of orchards there but, in the 1960s and 70s, these were largely ripped out and the land used to grow grain and potatoes. The daffodils have become increasingly limited to roadside banks and hedgerows but a few protected remnants of the old days still exist. We visited two small Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust reserves, Vell Mill Meadow and Gwen and Vera’s Fields, where our native daffodil still grows in profusion.

The wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, is smaller than the planted garden varieties and has pale yellow petals surrounding a darker yellow trumpet. Although greatly declined, it can still be seen in woodland and damp meadows in parts of south Devon, the Black Mountains in Wales, the Lake District, and in the Golden Triangle along the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border.

After three nights at Lion Lodge we headed further west to Pond Cottage near Tavistock in Devon, just to the west of Dartmoor. Although Pond Cottage is now owned by The Landmark Trust, it sits within the estate of the Endsleigh Hotel.

The 6th Duke and Duchess of Bedford built what is today the hotel in the early 19th century as a ‘cottage’ for themselves and their twelve children for when they wanted a break from their main home at Woburn Abbey. At the time they owned about a third of Devon and had the luxury of selecting the loveliest of spots:

They commissioned the architect Jeffry Wyatville to build the house and several  other picturesque buildings within the estate such as Pond Cottage. The landscape gardener Sir Humphrey Repton designed the gardens, including a stream that tumbles over waterfalls and down through an arboretum, arriving into the pond at Pond Cottage before spilling out into the River Tamar.

The damp conditions around the stream meant that there were some fantastic lichens. I don’t know much about lichens but think that this magnificent specimen might be Peltigera horizontalis.

There were always grey wagtails poking around the stream and pond:

And lots of yellow spotted sedge, Philopotamus montanus – caddisflies that fluttered around the wet vegetation at this time of year:

Several imposing Sequoias rose high above the rest of the arboretum..

..and there were plenty of other wonderful trees as well:

When the Bedford family finally sold the estate in 1956 it was bought by a syndicate who formed the Endsleigh Fishing Club, still retaining the atmosphere of a privately-run house. However, things started to increasingly fall into disrepair and the Landmark Trust bought three of the buildings in the grounds during the 1970s and 80s in order to save them – Pond Cottage, the Dairy and Swiss Cottage. In 2005 the remainder of the estate, including 108 acres of grounds, was bought by Olga Polizzi and transformed into a very comfortable hotel. We stayed in the hotel back in 2013 and have lovely memories of that time.

Given that it was Dartmoor in March, we had a week of pretty amazing weather and were able to spend four days walking up on the moor.

There was a lot of ‘swaling’ going on the moor when we were there – the farmers are allowed to burn the heather, gorse and other moorland vegetation between 1st October and 31st March to encourage new growth for the sheep to graze. Since it was getting on towards the end of March, time was fast running out to get this job done:

When Dave and I first started visiting Dartmoor on a regular basis back in June 2013, we hired a wildlife guide because we really wanted to see the Ring Ouzels that were known to breed there. But, despite extensive searching on two separate days, we unfortunately failed to find a single one.

The number of pairs of breeding Ring Ouzel on Dartmoor had been in decline for some time but Tavy Cleave, a remote valley in the north-west militarised zone, became their last stronghold not just on Dartmoor but for the whole of Southern England. Sadly they are now almost certainly gone from Tavy Cleave as well. The reasons for the decline are unclear but climate change, grazing patterns and problems at their over-wintering sites and on migration are all potential factors and these aren’t problems that are going to be solved anytime soon.

We had never visited Tavy Cleave before but did a walk there this week.

Although Ring Ouzels do start to arrive back in the UK from mid March, we certainly didn’t see one on our walk up Tavy Cleave. If we want to see breeding Ring Ouzels now, we are going to have to take ourselves further north.

It was lovely to get away but, as always, I was itching to get home to see how spring was getting on back in Kent. But it certainly won’t be long before we return to Dartmoor once more – although we are most unlikely to ever get such good weather there again.

One night this week we had permission to visit the Queen Mother’s pond at Walmer Castle after dark to see if we could photograph the toads that are known to breed there.

Once it got completely dark, it was very pleasing to find about six pairs of common toads, Bufo bufo, as well as a further five toads on their own:

These Walmer Castle toads certainly looked a very different colour to the toad that has been overwintering under some corrugated iron in the wood for the last two years:

There were also a few single male frogs in the Queen Mother’s pond, but they were all on their own and we didn’t see any frog spawn:

And there were some newts as well. Since Walmer Castle is outside the known range of palmate newts, these are most probably smooth newts:

When the Queen Mother’s pond was built back in 1997, no provision was made for wildlife to exit the water. These days English Heritage has added a ramp for this purpose:

Elsewhere in the Castle grounds, there is a very different kind of pond – a shallow and ephemeral pool in a wet meadow.

On another dark night we visited this pool with torches to see if there were toads there too. There weren’t any toads but there was more frog spawn than I’d ever seen before:

This pond does often dry up completely in the summer so I hope that this year there is sufficient time for the tadpoles to develop before this happens. I sent the photos of the frog spawn to the Kent county recorder for reptiles and amphibians who reassured me that frogs have evolved to breed in shallow waterbodies that dry up during the summer, and they can change their developmental rate to emerge more quickly if need be. Toads can’t do this and so will always choose a deeper pond to breed in. Frogs are successful some years but fail in others – but when they are successful they are often very successful and so it balances out over time. 

It was really nice to see the Walmer Castle toads happily breeding so close to the meadows. We only very occasionally see toads here though. They are creatures of habit and, although they can cover distances of up to two kilometres, they will tend use the same migration routes back to the breeding pond in which they hatched every year.

Our most memorable encounter with toads was in the shadow of Stac Pollaidh in the northwest Highlands of Scotland at the end of April 2018:

What had caught our eyes there were lots of toad balls in the shallow waters of the loch as male toads all piled on top of arriving females:

It was quite a mesmerising sight.

The recent poor weather has meant that there haven’t been many interesting trail camera photos for several weeks, but finally there are a few this week. A badger emerging up by day into the meadows:

The sett entrance on the steep cliff has also been seeing a lot of badger activity:

But as well as the badgers, there are a lot of rat comings and goings from this burrow, and I think there must be a family of rats down there too. I’m not sure how that can work though:

The magpies are building this year’s nest and are carrying sticks around. Sometimes the stick is a large one:

..and sometimes it’s so tiny that it’s surely not worth bothering with:

For quite a while now, we have only been seeing one particular kestrel hunting in the meadows, and here she is again taking a bath:

Blackcaps have been around all winter. Using the data from bird ringing, it is now known that the blackcaps that breed here in the summer will then migrate south and spend the winter in North Africa. However, they are replaced by blackcaps that breed in Central Europe and fly across to the UK in the autumn to spend the winter with us:

The small weasel is still going to and fro across this gate:

I think that this jet black jelly fungus is the intriguingly-named Warlock’s butter, Exidia nigricans, growing on a large piece of whitebeam wood.

But, for my final photos, I return once more to amphibians. When we took on the wood in 2019 there was no water there at all, other than small natural pools that collect in the centre of some of the coppice stools. We have since dug three rough-and-ready ponds, the first two of which are in the shade amongst the trees. But the third one, only built two years ago, is out in the open of the marjoram glade:

I am really pleased to report that some frogspawn has now appeared in this new pond – probably the first frogspawn to be laid in our wood for many, many years.

I’m taking this as concrete evidence that our attempts to improve biodiversity in the wood are having a positive impact and that makes me very happy indeed.

This week there was indisputable evidence that winter is on its way out as the annual frog spawning spectacle got underway. It’s the first big wildlife event of the year here and is always eagerly anticipated.

Male frogs, many of which will have spent the winter hibernating at the bottom of the pond, gather in shallow waters and wait for the arriving females, whose bellies will already be swollen with spawn.

At this special time of year, a smooth churring noise issues forth from the pond. A vocal sac in the frog’s throat inflates and deflates with air, amplifying the vibrations from its vocal cords and producing the sound.

This frog’s throat is deflated here:

And now it is puffed out:

This is all very restrained when compared with many other frog species. Photos on Wiki Commons of an Indian bullfrog (photo: Dr Raju Kasambe CCA 4.0) and Wayanad bush frog (Chinmayisk CCA 4.0) are examples of much more extreme croaking:

Our frogs may be less flamboyant than these but I never tire of attempting to get good shots of them as they gather together at this time of year. Once spawning is over, most of the adult frogs will leave the water and spend the rest of the year in the meadows eating insects, slugs, snails and worms.

There always seem to be many more males, but some females have been turning up:

As usual the spawn is laid in very shallow water, leading us to worry that there won’t be enough rain to keep everything wet until the tadpoles hatch. But this year we have a backup plan – there are now four sizeable rainwater tanks tucked behind our new garage and being fed from its large roof. Hosepipes can be run from these tanks down to the pond if necessary to raise their water level and stop the spawn from drying out. We also plan to use them in the height of summer if the ponds look like they might lose all their water completely.

The success of this year’s spawning is due in no small part to our two scarecrows, MacKenzie and Dude, who have been completely successful in keeping the herons away and the frogs safe:

If the pair of badgers here are going to have any cubs this year, they will have been born by now. A couple of years ago a new tunnel was dug that emerges directly out into the meadows. There has been some recent spring cleaning underground and old bedding has been dragged out from this entrance:

We also have a camera on another sett entrance on the cliff where we are seeing a female going in and out. The cliff is very steep here but there is a nice, safe terrace in front of the hole and we are hoping that this is where the cubs might first emerge in April:

We had to move a pile of wood to get access to cut a hedge this week. A beetle, Oedemera femoralis, was found hibernating in amongst the wood:

He also had amazing eyes:

Once he has woken from hibernation, this nationally scarce beetle will be nocturnal, feeding on the pollen and nectar of ivy and willow. It is only the males that have those big thighs – in fact he is the rather dowdy cousin of the swollen-thighed beetle, Oedemara nobilis, photographed below in the meadows in June 2019:

Hazel doesn’t do very well on the dry chalk soils of the meadows. However, the few hazel trees that we have here are now out in flower. The male catkins produce pollen to waft around freely in the breezes before the deciduous trees get their leaves. There are also three female flowers shown here sitting above the catkins, in a position where they are less likely to be self pollinated. If a grain of pollen lands on them, they will develop into hazel nuts in the autumn.

The strange-looking female flowers of the hazel in more detail:

But hazel grows very well indeed on the wetter soils at the wood. One minute it seems like we have the whole of the winter stretching ahead to do the hazel coppicing and clearing that we had planned. But, in the blink of an eye, time is fast running out and we are seized with a bad dose of last-minute-itis as spring approaches, when the birds will start nesting and the dormice awaken. We are currently busy opening up a small clearing near the marjoram glade:

It may not be large but the sun is now satisfyingly hitting the woodland floor and before long there should be some understorey growth. Our wood management is geared towards supporting dormice who will eat the blossom and berries of these understorey plants:

We are building dead hedges with some of the cut material which will provide protected highways and shelter for the dormice:

We have also set aside some lovely poles that we hope to use for den-building with one of our little grandsons sometime soon. We want to show him what fun there is to be had at the wood.

This colourful species of jelly fungus found in the wood is a Tremella species – probably Tremella mesenterica:

My last photo today is of a grey seal haul-out that my brother came across on a walk on the Roseland Penninsula in Cornwall last weekend.

What an amazing and uplifting sight.

A lot of people turned out for last Sunday’s Great Comp Snowdrop Fair. Great Comp garden, near Sevenoaks in Kent, is closed during the winter but it does open for just one day in mid February to hold its annual celebration of the snowdrop.

Frances Heron-Maxwell, a suffragette and a great supporter of women’s hockey and cricket, lived at Great Comp for fifty years in the first half of the 20th century. There was a cricket ground and hockey pitch in the grounds and women’s international matches were even played there. Then, in 1957, Eric and Joy Cameron bought the house and dedicated themselves to creating a beautiful garden, known for its rare plants. They set up a charitable trust to care for the house and grounds after their deaths so that we all now have the opportunity to enjoy it.

But no garden looks its best in February and I would like to return to Great Comp later in the year. In a few weeks the fifty types of magnolia that are grown there should be out in flower and that should be a wonderful sight.

It was inevitable that I would came away with a selection of new snowdrops to plant out in the garden. It would have been easy to go completely wild but I did manage some restraint and bought only five, in deference to how expensive these special varieties can be. I did see several for sale that were £75 for a single bulb.

By chatting to the stallholders I also picked up some useful tips on how to successfully grow snowdrops. One suggestion was that I should cover my most precious bulbs with horticultural fleece once they start to die back to stop the narcissus bulb fly (Merodon equestris) getting at them. The female hoverfly will lay her eggs onto the dying vegetation of daffodils, bluebells and snowdrops and the resulting larvae will then burrow down and live off the bulb, often killing it.

Much as I want to encourage hoverflies, this doesn’t extend to giving them complete freedom over my treasured snowdrop varieties. Let them instead run rampant over the hundreds of Spanish bluebells that flourish in the garden here, despite my efforts to pull them all up.

It is frog spawning season, but it has been too cold and windy for them to properly get going yet. We did see a pair looking like swamp monsters in the garden pond which has always struggled with duckweed

I record the date that we first see frogspawn each year and this has ranged from 10th February in 2020 to 8th March in 2018, so there is quite a big window.

The birds of prey have been out in the meadows:

All these birds of prey have a taste for short-tailed field voles, an animal that particularly likes overgrown fields with damp, tussocky grass. A large area of the second meadow that was not cut last autumn seems to be fulfilling this rough-grassland brief nicely:

As well as the grass tussocks there are lots of large ant nests. These are yellow meadow ants, Lasius flavus, that are only ever seen above ground when the winged ants disperse. For the rest of the time they are busy farming underground aphids – the aphids eat the grass roots and the ants eat the honeydew produced by the aphids. The nests can get very large in just one year if the meadow is not cut:

The kestrel is often to be found hovering over this tussocky area:

A visiting son took a video on his phone of a crow brandishing one of our rodents around. Here is a screenshot:

Crows are always very prominent in the meadows:

I am much fonder of them than I am of magpies:

But on the subject of magpies, the bird nesting season has got underway this week with one seen carrying a stick. They will ordinarily build a new nest each spring and I wonder where this year’s will be:

Spring is definitely on its way and a dunnock was singing so beautifully in the sunshine of this morning:

There is still a bitter easterly wind, though.

I finish today with a new project of ours which is to use the Ancient Tree Inventory to track down and visit the ancient trees of East Kent. Many are yew trees planted in churchyards and this week we ticked three of these off.

The ancient yews at Ringwould, Ripple and Thanington Without:

The yew at Ringwould on the left above is thought to be 1,300 years old. It is quite a sight to behold and I find it difficult to get my brain round how much change this tree has witnessed since it was planted in 700AD. Of course, it is also perfectly possible that this already-ancient tree might still be around in another thousand years but it is even more difficult to imagine what things might be like then..

Every February I get a little bit more besotted by snowdrops. There are a bewildering 2,500 varieties available in the UK and there is a stamp-collecting part of my brain that urges me on to plant as many as possible of these in the garden.

Last February I started a snowdrop bank, planting some normal and a few more unusual (and therefore expensive) varieties. I particularly like the ones with yellow ovaries which are unfortunately less vigorous, but ‘Madelaine’, shown above, has reappeared on the bank this year and seems to be doing rather well. However, I also planted three Spindlestone Surprise bulbs which have, so far, failed to come up at all.

This week we visited another garden that was open under the National Garden Scheme Snowdrop Festival. The garden was near Sutton Valance, a village south east of Maidstone, so we took the opportunity to visit Sutton Valance Castle whilst we were in the area:

Spring Platt is a garden on the North Downs with beautiful, far-reaching views out over the Kentish Weald:

The garden is surrounded by a large fruit farm growing Gala apples:

Four hundred and fifty varieties of snowdrop grow in the garden, and a lot of these are displayed in this snowdrop theatre:

We enjoyed scrutinising the pots and identifying the ones that we particularly liked. Lulu is certainly a very nice one:

Dave, with his interest in military history, wants to grow Lord Kitchener simply because he likes its name:

The owner of the garden recommended that I tried growing Belvedere Gold, which is apparently one of the easiest, yellow-ovaried varieties to grow:

One of the greenhouses in the garden is dedicated to successfully growing various different citrus trees. Dave was inspired by this, but I feel that we don’t have the necessary skill or dedication and it will all end in tears:

We always come away bursting with ideas when we visit a garden, but reality inevitably begins to bite when we return to our own highly-exposed piece of land perched on dry chalk cliffs.

Back in those very exposed meadows, I am surprised to notice what large feet weasels have:

A wet fox emerges up into the meadows from the cliff:

Badgers don’t seem to mind awful weather and positively relish the rain because this is when the worms come out, but unfortunately our male badger now seems to be blinded in his left eye:

The eye is open but is no longer reflecting light:

Badgers mainly rely on their extremely sensitive sense of smell and their eyesight is pretty poor anyway, so the loss of his eye shouldn’t cause him too many problems. He certainly seems happy enough:

Since this male is now so readily identifiable with only one eye, I have come to realise that there is occasionally a second male around, and he is so much beefier and pugnacious-looking. He actually lumbers from side to side as he walks:

The trail cameras have been affected by condensation recently, but birds of prey have been out and about in the meadows:

On sunny, still days over the winter, little collections of leaves have been floating on the water surface of the wild pond. If you stop and watch them properly, it becomes apparent that the groups of leaves are propelling themselves around:

Over in the wood, I did the annual maintenance tour around the dormouse boxes this week, removing any remaining nesting material, so that they are clean for when the animals reawaken in the spring. At the moment dormice will be hibernating down at ground level where the winter temperatures are more constant.

Every box had signs that birds have been using them for shelter over the cold winter nights:

Box 1 and box 29 both still had old nests in them, but they also had considerable quantities of fresh black droppings indicating that something was currently living on top of the nest:

I ignored this in box 1 and cleared the old nest out. But, in box 29, a pygmy shrew poked its little head up through the leaves just as I was debating with myself what to do. Pygmy shrews are very sensitive and can apparently easily die of fright, so I quickly closed the box back up and retreated. I now know what this mess is and, in future years, will leave such boxes undisturbed until the shrew has finished with it.

Box 12 had a brood of marsh tits in it last spring:

Whilst I was working on the dormouse boxes, Dave was putting up some new bird boxes. He put one up in the vicinity of box 12 in case marsh tits want to nest in the same area this year as well:

This micromoth was beautifully camouflaged on a silver birch trunk:

There is a stand of silver birch in the wood and I love to find evidence of the specialised birch-loving ecosystem that has developed around these trees. This week’s grey birch button moth is part of this, as are the birch polypore and fly agaric fungi that we often see there. More than 200 insects have been recorded in association with silver birch, including 130 species of moth – this means lots of caterpillars around to feed insectivorous birds. There are also two interesting shield bugs, the birch shield bug and the parent bug, and I hope be able to find these feeding on birch catkins in late summer.

I was not pleased to see a heron in the wood this week, catching itself a hibernating frog. I don’t think that there are many frogs in the wood but I had been hoping to get frog spawn nonetheless. This chance may now have gone:

Another long-running battle is who will win occupancy of the tawny nest box. Tawny owls did successfully nest there one year but I’m afraid to say that it usually the squirrels that are victorious. It seems to be going the same way again this year:

The tawny owls have been showing some interest but I am not at all hopeful:

Sparrowhawks have become very fond of taking a bath in this pond, but on occasions they are disappointed:

The overwintering woodcock are still in the wood. They will be leaving to return to Finland and Russia in mid March to early April:

A scarlet elf cup Sarcoscypha austriaca (or perhaps ruby elf cup Sarcoscypha coccinea because you need a microscope to distinguish these two) is a welcome pop of colour on an otherwise drab winter woodland floor:

There are signs that the wood is once again a popular crow roost this winter, but the birds don’t arrive until dusk and this is the only evidence we have of it:

My final photo for today is of a barn owl taken at Sandwich Bay, just up the coast from the meadows, where barn owls and short eared owls have been flying by day this winter and delighting photographers. I went on a group walk last week with the warden of the Sandwich Bay Observatory. We saw a lot and I learned all sorts of things, but unfortunately it was not great weather and we only had distant views of owls on this occasion:

But I hope to return there before the end of winter to have another go.

A link to last February’s post on snowdrops can be found here:

Galanthomania

King Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was unable to provide him with a male heir, so he very much wanted to divorce her. But first he needed to take the monumental step of breaking away from the Church of Rome that wouldn’t allow it.

This was a colossal upheaval with far-reaching consequences for the country. One of these was that Walmer Castle was built in 1539 – part of a coastal defence system to protect against the threat of an invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, wanting to re-establish the Pope’s authority in England.

The invasion never came, but the castle did eventually see action in the Second Civil War in 1648 when it was seized by Royalists and was only retaken by Parliamentary forces after several months of fighting.

In the 18th century the castle became the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. Various Prime Ministers were appointed Lord Warden, including the Duke of Wellington who spent a lot of time at the castle and then died there in 1852. By 1904, the War Office accepted that it had no further military use and passed the care of the castle to the Ministry of Works and then subsequently on to English Heritage.

We have a print of an 1822 painting of Walmer Castle by William Daniell as viewed from the south, with Walmer and Deal in the background. If that bonneted lady continued walking her dog just a little bit further towards the viewer, she could have been walking through what today is Walmermeadows:

The Queen Mother was Lord Warden from 1978 until her death in 2002. In 1997, English Heritage built the Queen Mother’s garden at the Castle in honour of her 95th birthday.

A corgi still remains in the garden today:

The current Lord Warden is Admiral Sir George Zambellas who has been newly appointed to the position in October 2024. A statue of him, made out of tiny pieces of slate, is now displayed in the Castle:

Walmer Castle is surrounded by thirty-two acres of formal gardens and parkland:

The Kitchen gardens are a bit of a highlight. At the moment they are looking rather bare:

I am rather envious of the mistletoe that they have successfully ‘planted’ onto branches of their apple trees:

But by April the kitchen gardens will no doubt be show-stopping:

There is a wonderful variety of venerable trees in the gardens:

I have been volunteering at Walmer Castle for the last two years as part of their wellbeing programme. This winter I have taken on an additional role as one of the newly-created volunteer wildlife monitoring team and I’m excited to see what will be discovered there once the grounds come alive in the spring.

But, for now, Dave and I are visiting to properly familiarise ourselves with the garden and to pinpoint potentially interesting areas. We are also photographing some of the birds spending the winter there.

So many of the mature trees have woodpecker holes in them and we are frequently seeing green and great-spotted woodpeckers:

Pleasing to get two green woodpeckers in one shot:

In the gazebo in the Queen Mother’s garden we spotted two of these green, thorny chrysalids high up near the ceiling:

My macro camera turned everything very orange for some reason, but does show the interestingly-shaped chrysalid in greater detail:

This is the overwintering stage of the large white butterfly. It’s a common butterfly but I hadn’t seen one of their chrysalids before. So long as it hasn’t been parasitised, the butterfly should hatch out in March or April.

Now, at the very beginning of February, the woodland gardens are starting to awaken with emerging spring bulbs:

It is a special and historic place and how wonderful to have it on our doorstep. But, although the garden is close to the meadows geographically, it is also a very different habitat in many ways and it will be really interesting to see how that impacts what we find there over the next few months. Another reason to be excited for spring.