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.

We certainly would not have chosen to make our winter visit to Elmley Nature Reserve during Storm Herminia. It was especially unfortunate because we were bringing our son and daughter-in-law with us to introduce them to all the wonderful wildlife that seeks sanctuary on the reserve over the winter months.

Twenty-five short-eared owls have been regularly roosting in a field alongside the reserve car park and I was hoping that we would get some really good views. As well as that, large numbers of marsh harriers would no doubt be gathering at the reedbeds to roost at dusk, which is always quite a sight. But unfortunately things didn’t go to plan and Storm Herminia raged her way across southern Britain for most of our stay, bringing with her strong winds and a lot of rain. It was raining heavily at dusk and we definitely did not see the harrier roost and nor did we see a single short-eared owl.

But despite all this wild weather, we still managed to have an enjoyable time.

At first we trudged around in the rain getting very wet, but the birds were sensibly hunkered down and very little was seen:

Warming up in the cow byre over lunch:

There is a two mile track through the marsh between the reserve entrance gate and the car park. You are requested to stay in your car and think of it as a safari, using the vehicle as a mobile hide. We decided that viewing the birds from the shelter of the car might be the best way to spend the afternoon in the circumstances, so we turned the heated seats in the Volvo up to max and took ourselves off on a marshland safari:

But the standout birding highlight for me was this long-eared owl roosting in a thicket by the car park:

Although I knew that there were long-eared owls on the reserve, I hadn’t expected to see one because they roost in dense cover and generally only emerge after dark.

Owls hate the wind and the rain and so, in the midst of Storm Herminia as we were, we failed to see the three species of owl that I had hoped to spot. Last January there had been plenty of short-eared owls on show:

We have seen barn owls on every other visit to Elmley:

A pair of little owls live amongst the ruins of the Old Schoolhouse and are ordinarily very easy to see:

The fifth and final British owl species is the tawny owl, but this owl is a woodland specialist and is only occasionally seen or heard in the marshland habitat at Elmley.

We do, however, regularly see tawny owls at our wood and in the meadows. For the sake of completeness, here are tawny owls that have appeared on our trail cameras this week:

We spent the night in adjacent shepherds huts whilst the tempest howled outside:

We awoke the next morning to some sunshine, although it remained very windy:

After breakfast we walked down to the bird hides, enjoying the sun but still battling against the wind:

Marsh harriers and kestrels were frequently seen over the marsh during our stay. There was also this buzzard:

As it flew, we saw that it had caught itself a bird:

It was still very windy down at the hides and few birds were about. However, it was nice to see some grey plover:

And a small group of snipe:

By the end of our trip, we had chalked up forty-six species of bird which is not bad given the state of the weather. But there is no doubt that Elmley had not been seen at its best, and I hope that our son and daughter-in-law will be prepared to give it another chance sometime soon.

We ourselves are already booked to return in May. The short-eared owls will be gone but there should be baby birds everywhere.

We spent last weekend in the only remaining working semaphore tower in the country. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo and amidst concern about a possible French invasion, it was part of a chain of fifteen semaphore stations stretching the seventy-five miles from Admiralty House in London down to the Naval fleet in Portsmouth.

At the top of the tower is a mast with two pivoted arms that can spell words out by semaphore as illustrated by this poster below:

Between 1822 and 1847 there would be two people working in the tower during daylight hours, one looking through a telescope to the next tower to the north and the other looking at the one to the south. When all went well, the Navy could send a message between London and Portsmouth in fifteen minutes. However, electric telegraph was invented in 1839 which eventually superseded the need for the semaphore system and the towers were decommissioned.

After that time, Chatley Heath tower was used to house the families of estate workers, but it had fallen empty by 1963. Then, in 1984, it was gutted by a devastating fire. Although Surrey County Council repaired it, by the start of the 21st century water was getting in and threatening its structural integrity. Its future was looking very uncertain.

But the good news is that the Landmark Trust now cares for Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower. This charity rescues and sympathetically restores buildings at risk and then lets them out for self-catering holidays, using the income to pay for any future maintenance costs. The necessary restoration work began on the tower in early 2020, a few weeks before the pandemic struck, but the tower did eventually open to paying guests in the summer of 2021.

The Chatley Heath tower was the junction for a second branch of stations going down to Plymouth but this line was never completed:

The building has a basement and the main bathroom is on the ground floor. There are bedrooms on the first and second floors and the sitting room is on the third. The kitchen is on the fourth floor and there is a roof terrace above that. In total, there are a hundred steep and winding steps connecting all of these rooms:

From up on the roof you looked down onto the crowns of the surrounding trees:

The trees were alive with small birds searching for invertebrates:

The building is set in 800 acres of woodland and heathland, but is also very close to the M25/A3 intersection:

Anyone who has travelled south round the M25 recently will know that there have been major roadworks at its junction with the A3 over the past few months. In fact the A3 was completely closed over the weekend that we were staying because the Cockcrow Heathland Bridge was being lowered into place. This resulted in chaos on the other roads in the area – along with the dog being unable to manage the stairs, this was the second major challenge of the weekend.

The Cockcrow Bridge will be the UK’s first heathland bridge, connecting up the precious heath habitat that had been bisected by the A3:

We walked to the site of the bridge works to see how they were getting on:

As well as the new bridge, there was evidence that much heathland restoration work had already taken place:

It was all very interesting and we would love to return in a couple of years to see how it all looks once things have settled down.

Over the course of the weekend, we visited three National Trust properties, all of which were very generous with their dog policy. Polesden Lacey was bequeathed to the Trust by Mrs Greville in 1942.

The house itself was closed on the day of our visit but we would have loved to have seen the Edwardian interior. It was extensively remodelled by Mrs Greville in 1906 when she bought the house as her weekend retreat.

Hatchlands Park has been cared for by the National Trust since 1945. This house was also closed but we managed an invigorating walk in the extensive parkland and ate lunch in its cafe:

This twisted sweet chestnut in the grounds was planted in the 1740s:

Our third National Trust property, Claremont Landscape Gardens, was another interesting place:

After our walk, a little robin was very interested in the cake that we were eating at the cafe:

Meanwhile, back in the meadows, ghostly white barn owls are appearing on the cameras most nights:

Good to see that they are managing to catch some food:

A barn owl has even been seen in the vicinity of the new barn owl nest box:

The ringed female kestrel is still hunting in the meadows:

And the partially leucistic jay has reappeared after a few weeks absence:

A firecrest in the baking tray bath:

A badger in its characteristic tummy-scratching position:

And the weasel continues to pass to and fro along the gate:

January often feels like a long month and it was good to have visited somewhere new and interesting. I had actually always fancied staying in a tower, but now I feel that this itch has been well and truly scratched and I never need do it again. I know for sure that the dog agrees with me.

We have never been particularly good at sticking to New Year resolutions. However, this year we have decided to get ourselves off on a longish walk each week of 2025 to discover more of beautiful East Kent, whilst also getting fitter in the process.

The first of these walks last week took us past the ancient sweet chestnuts in Fredville Park near the village of Nonington. These trees were planted in the 1740s to create two tree-lined avenues leading from Fredville House out into its parkland.

The National Trust website states that one ancient oak hosts more biodiversity than a thousand 100-year-old oaks. As a tree ages, different types of decay, broken off branches and all manner of folds, burrs, loose bark and water pools create many different habitats for an increasing range of species.

Majesty, the largest surviving maiden oak tree in the United Kingdom and estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 years old, also stands in state at Fredville Park. However, the tree is on land with no public access and it requires special permission to go and see him. We did get this consent in 2018 and again in 2019 and have twice gone to pay our respects to his Majesty:

Delving into my photo archive for the 2019 photos of Majesty made me enthusiastic to gather together pictures of other elderly trees that we have come across in recent years:

We have our own impressive tree growing in the wood. It’s a sycamore coppice made up of a dozen connected trunks that have been left to grow enormous:

Jelly ears fungus is growing abundantly on any dead limbs:

And, above a height of about five metres, there is a healthy growth of lichen on the trunks:

We measured the girth at a height of 0.3m and found it to be 7.3m:

It is a really quite a tree and definitely one of the highlights of the wood.

I have been busy getting out the annual reviews of this blog and it has been a few weeks now since my last normal post. On the weekend before Christmas we had a cup of coffee at the shack at the end of Deal pier. It was just before midday and yet the mid-winter shadows were so long:

We hadn’t lingered over our coffee, yet it seemed like a completely different day by the time we returned back down the pier towards the town:

When the weather has allowed it, we have been getting on with winter jobs in the meadows such as hacking back bramble and planting trees. Nine new trees have been planted, some of which went to plug gaps in the new hedgerow:

One day I was out pruning this new hedge when two choughs flew past me, along the cliff-line southwards to Dover, where choughs were reintroduced in 2023. This was a very special sighting although sadly I didn’t get a photo.

Some of our other newly planted trees were fruit trees and went into the orchard. There is an insect hotel with a slate roof in the orchard and, whilst we were tree planting, we noticed something interesting happening on those slates:

The slates were covered with several hundred tiny cones, each only a couple of millimetres long. Once we had got our eyes in, we saw that the cones were slowly moving around:

This called for my macro lens. They turn out to be the caterpillars of the Luffia moth (Luffia lapidella form ferchaultella) that have protected themselves by building a cone of silk onto which fine grains of sand and soil were stuck:

The Luffia moth (Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella) is a common moth across the south of England but amazingly there are only females and all the young are produced parthogenically – they develop from an egg without it needing to be fertilised. As well as the crazy fact that there are no males involved, the adult females themselves are flightless and distribution is thought to be by wind

Interestingly, there is a different form of this moth in Cornwall (Luffia lapidella rather than the Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella across the rest of southern Britain) and this Cornish form does have winged males.

The weasel has been seen a few more times on the gate, although mostly moving and blurry:

To demonstrate just how small this animal is, I have cropped these two photos by the same amount to compare it with the size of a rat:

We had bought a small bale of dust-extracted barley straw to go into the hedgehog box that has recently gone out into the garden. We had no use for the rest of the bale so it went down by the wild pond in case the badgers were interested in using it as bedding in their nearby sett:

They definitely were interested:

But, because the straw was cut into short strands, it didn’t roll well and merely smeared itself into a straw road as the badgers dragged it off:

Looking over the fence, the straw road led down the cliff a short way and straight to a burrow. We couldn’t have planned this better if we had tried because we now have a good idea where baby badgers may be born in February and can get a camera on this sett entrance:

As usual at this time of year the trail cameras are not coming up with very much, but barn owls are still hunting in the meadows:

This next photo is amusing and I can tell you that I recognise those skinny black legs. Magpies often escort raptors around the meadows:

We have a new camera looking at the perch in the second meadow and it is doing a very good job coping with the miserable January low light and rain. It’s early days but so far I’m very impressed – it is twice as expensive as our normal cameras though:

It got very cold this week and the ponds froze over, although some areas around the reeds had melted by the end of the day. When I took out the peanuts at dusk, a little egret gracefully rose up from the pond just as I came alongside. Even though the bird was no doubt after our frogs and newts, it was forgiven because we have only ever once before seen an egret hunting in the ponds.

There is a camera looking along the banks of this pond, but unfortunately this did not have the egret on it. However, the camera looking at where the peanuts go down had been triggered by a hopeful fox twenty minutes before I arrived, and this does show the egret in the far right of the picture:

On Christmas Eve we completed the cutting and clearing of all the dogwood in the marjoram glade in the wood. Work in this large space is now completed and I am looking forward to the woodland butterflies we will see there in the summer:

We dug a pond in this marjoram clearing two years ago and this week the camera there captured a pair of sparrowhawks:

The wood is definitely well stocked with sparrowhawks but we’ve never seen two together before:

The ponds froze at the wood as well:

Fieldfares arrive at the woodland ponds at dusk throughout the winter to take a bath:

Woodcock are another winter visitor to visit the ponds:

Although they are not often seen bathing:

My final photo for today was taken on the second of our New Year resolution walks. This time we walked south along the cliffs towards St Margarets Bay and here we are returning home inland on a sunny early January day:

It’s going to be a bit of a challenge to plan a new and interesting walk for each week of the year and no doubt we shall have to start repeating ourselves eventually. But every walk, when done in a different season, should have something new to offer and it’s good to set ourselves a fresh and exciting target for 2025.

Part 1 of this review covered the birds in the meadows during 2024 and now I want to report on what everything else has been getting up to.

In 2023 four curved banks were built out of low-nutrient chalky soil that had been dug out for the foundations of our new garage. They were seeded with native annual and perennial plants and, by June this year, were looking pretty spectacular. Contemplating this photo now, imprisoned within the dark and cold of winter, they look impossibly cheering:

2. Mammals

As far as the foxes go, it was a year of two halves. At the start I was battling to cure a lovely and very tame vixen of her mange:

Since then, the foxes have been mange-free for the rest of the year and long may that last. There were no cubs this year though.

In April, Dave was working at the top of the second meadow. I was bringing out a cup of tea when I saw that he was being quietly observed from the hay pile:

Before long the fox noticed me looking at him looking at Dave and quietly loped off but the delightful interaction sticks in my memory:

Another encounter with our resident foxes happened during the annual cut of the meadows in September. Whenever he heard the sound of the tractor engine, a fox would magically materialise to see if there were any voles that had been uncovered:

It was a very good vole year and he found a lot:

The badgers have had a bit of a mixed year as well. Triplets were born in February and they first appeared above ground in April. As usual, the male was not permitted anywhere near them to begin with and the cubs only emerged under the close supervision of their mother:

As they grew, eventually the male was allowed into the group

But mortality in badger cubs is very high and only one in every three cubs survives to be a year old. So it is perhaps not surprising that one of this year’s cubs had unfortunately disappeared by June.

In July the mother badger demonstrated how to raid a buff-tailed bumblebee nest to the two remaining cubs. A nearby trail camera caught a muddy cub looking thoroughly invigorated by the whole thing:

The dug out nest the next morning:

And the cubs returned to the area to relive the excitement:

But by October I’m afraid to report that another cub had gone:

Now, as the new year begins, this cub is spending the winter cosily tucked up in the sett with its parents and I am reassured to see all three of them coming to the peanuts most nights.

I finish this year’s badgers’ story with a photo of one of the adults in the second meadow in June:

A stoat, seen in May, was a new mammal for the meadows:

A weasel appeared on this gate in November and has been seen there several times since:

I include this photo of a rat because we have never seen one preying on other rodents before:

I think that this enormous animal launching itself into the pond has to be a rat because of its tail, but I am surprised by the sheer size and colour of the animal:

I can’t look at this last photo in the mammal section without giggling. We do occasionally see neighbourhood cats on the cameras:

3. Amphibians and Reptiles

A few years ago just over a hundred slow worms were relocated to the meadows from a nearby small piece of land that was to be developed. Since that time an ecologist has visited several times a year to check on their wellbeing and advise on habitat management in the release area. But this autumn marked the satisfactory end of the project and the arriving slow worms are now judged to be happily integrated into meadow life.

There is a population of smooth newts in both ponds. Things kick off for them in March when the delightfully spotty males start shadowing the females, hoping to be the one to fertilise her eggs:

I have a polarising filter for the camera which improves things when taking photos into the water. Here a female has come to the surface for a gulp of air and is now sinking down and away from her air bubble:

At the beginning of April, the slow worm ecologist showed us how to spot newt eggs, laid onto pond weed with the tip of the leaf folded over for its protection

In June we were watching as an emperor dragonfly laid her eggs into the pond. We suddenly realised that there was a newt below her, presumably eating the eggs as they appeared. The emperor kept leaving and returning to this spot to lay, and the newt was always there waiting:

Some male frogs will hibernate on land but others will be buried in the mud at the bottom of the pond. These ones will then be first on the scene when they awake in February and gather together in the wild pond to wait for arriving females.

A few years ago frog numbers were decimated by a grey heron, but things are picking up again now:

You have to feel sorry for the females because this is what happens when one arrives at the pond:

They all bundle in, although eventually one male will win out and sit on top of the female to claim her as he waits for her to lay her eggs:

A male sticking his head out of a mass of already-developing spawn:

Reptiles and amphibians need to be careful because they can be regarded as a tasty snack. Here is a magpie with a newt and a kestrel with a lizard:

But, as the year comes to an end, they are all back safely hibernating. We found a pit of four lizards spending the winter together under a sampling square:

4. Invertebrates

Since coming to the meadows, I have become fascinated by the life cycles of the invertebrates that we have discovered here. The first photo in this section was taken at the beginning of February when lots of great pond snails (Lymnaea stagnalis) were floating upside down on the surface of the wild pond. I realised that I didn’t understand much about the anatomy of a water snail when I saw its mouth at the front but what was that siphon on the side taking in air?

We spotted another interesting snail in February, this time a small land snail. A two-toothed door snail (Clausilia bidentata) was attached to the bottom of a trail camera that was sitting on a rotting log:

In April I noticed that hairy-footed flower bees (Anthophora plumipes) were visiting the ‘shrimps on the barbie’ pulmonaria in a pot by the back door. I really like this plant and was pleased to see that this sweet-looking bee agreed with me;

This is another endearing animal that is on the wing in April. But the bee-flies don’t have such a lovable lifestyle since they are parasites of mining bees.

By May, green longhorn moths (Adela reaumurella) were dancing along the hedgerows. This male has antennae that are three times the length of his forewing:

These mating green shieldbugs (Palomena prasina) looked similar when viewed from above:

But from the side they were clearly different. The larger female is on the right:

From the side it was also possible to see their strange-looking mouthparts, adapted for sucking the sap out of plants, and the stink gland by their second pair of legs. An odorous liquid is produced from this, designed to deter predators:

The centipede Henia vesuviana was an exciting spot. It was several times longer than any other centipede I had previously seen, and moved its seventy-one pairs of legs in a very leisurely fashion:

Everything I read about this species said that it grows up to five centimetres, but ours was eight or nine:

St Mark’s flies are easily noticed once they emerge in May since they fly with their hind legs dangling. This mating pair was an ideal opportunity to see how different a male is from a female. The smaller male is on the right with his clear wings and large eyes:

In previous years we have photographed mating Empis tessellata, Britain’s largest dance flies. A male of these predatory flies will catch a St Mark’s fly and wait with it for a female to come along. Once she does, he offers her the prey as a ‘nuptial gift’ and mates with her as she eats it:

This year I was delighted to see the same thing happening again, but this time on a much smaller scale with a different species of Empis fly that is only about 3mm long:

Depressingly, Butterfly conservation’s 2024 Big Butterfly Count recorded the lowest number of butterflies in the programme’s 14-year history and we certainly noticed that there were generally far fewer than normal around. But here are some that we did see:

The hide pond was popular with dragonflies this summer. Here a male broad-bodied chaser awaits a female:

And a southern hawker lays eggs into the water:

I have a friend who is very interested in hoverflies and helped me improve my own hoverfly ID skills this year. I feel like I made a lot of progress but I’ve probably forgotten it all now:

Towards the end of summer we found two wasp spiders on their webs amongst the meadows grasses:

And Dave had a large privet hawkmoth caterpillar clinging to his clothing. This caterpillar will have been wandering the meadows to look for somewhere to pupate for the winter when it got picked up by Dave’s trousers:

Long bodied cellar spider spiders, Pholcus phalangioides, are not native and they can only survive here in our houses and sheds. I was interested to see a cellar spider feasting on a much larger spider in the conservatory:

I thought this was also quite a sight – a tawny cockroach, Ectobius pallidus, is a British native that lives outside and doesn’t need to shelter in our houses. This female is carrying around her egg sac that she will eventually lay in the soil:

On 7th September we set off round the meadows with the dog and immediately realised that something pretty spectacular had happened. Hundreds if not thousands of red admiral butterflies had flown across The Channel and arrived in the meadows and were now fluttering around the hedgerows and long grasses wherever we went. I took lots of photos but found it difficult to capture the scale of the irruption:

By the next day most of the butterflies had moved on and things returned to normal.

This completes my review of the meadows, and a beautiful sunset is my final curtain to draw across our 2024 wildlife year:

As the New Year begins I am excited to see what fresh delights it will bring.

The spring of 2024 was quite mild in East Kent, but it was also pretty wet and overcast. The summer that followed was a bit cooler than average and, most importantly for us, had just about enough rain to stop the ponds from fully drying out.

We have been managing the meadows for a decade now and it’s interesting how different every one of those years has been. Weather plays a big part in this, but we hope that our meadow management is also having a positive impact as we strive to do the best for this lovely piece of land.

Here is a summary of the highs and the lows of the meadows in 2024:

1. Birds

In 2023 a pair of swifts took up residence in one of the swift nest boxes attached to the house. They must have been two-year-old birds since they didn’t breed but just bagged the box for themselves by staying in there for a long time. They then left to migrate back to Africa in late July.

We had really hoped that we would see them again in 2024 and it was a truly exciting moment when, on 17th May, they both arrived back into the box:

By this point Dave had managed to set up a camera in the box, but the quality of the pictures wasn’t that great. We will try to upgrade the camera for the 2025 swift season.

Swifts eat, drink and sleep on the wing, so it is a real privilege to be able to view them at their nest which is the only time in their lives that they stop flying

The pair went on to build a nest from feathers that they had caught in mid air, which were then stuck together with saliva. On 27th May the first egg was laid, followed by a second one two days later:

After the second egg was laid, the adult birds took it in turns to incubate the eggs while the other went out to feed, but both birds were always together in the box overnight. The eggs would have hatched around the 17th June, nineteen days after incubation started, but we were away on holiday until a few days later. We returned home, full of anxious anticipation to see how the swifts were getting on, and were elated to find two chicks contentedly sitting in the nest:

Each time an adult returned to the nest, its throat bulging with a ball of insects caught in flight, mayhem broke out as the chicks scrabbled to be the one to get the food. Here is the successful chick being fed:

We thought the chicks looked like little penguins at this stage, with their tail and flight feathers still in their protective sheaths:

By 16th July, it was getting pretty crowded in the box at night when all four of the birds were in there:

The chicks continued to grow and, by 23rd July, were stretching out their wings and preparing to fly:

They were also showing interest in the big wide world outside the box:

On 29th July, the first young bird fledged leaving one solitary chick in the box:

But the remaining bird then also left the next morning and our swift year had come to an end.

Throughout most of 2023 and into the beginning of 2024 we had builders in to work on the house and also to build a new garage and wildlife tower in the front garden. The tower was to contain two swift boxes but this last remaining job still hadn’t been completed by the beginning of May 2024, when the swifts were expected to return any day. Luckily our builder was always very sympathetic to our wildlife-related requests and returned do the last bits on the tower in the nick of time:

With the tower now finished, loud calls were played through the entrance holes while the birds were in the country. In mid July it was very gratifying to see groups of swifts circling the tower in response to this. I hope that they spotted the holes and will be back to nest there soon, although it did take four or five years until we had success with the boxes that are attached to the house.

Hobbies migrate to and from Africa along with the swifts, using the birds as a mobile larder. Once they arrive back in the UK, they switch from eating swifts to catching dragonflies on the wing. The bird ringers had seen hobbies over the meadows previously but this photo, taken on 27th May, was the first time that one had appeared on the cameras:

The successful breeding of a pair of swifts rather grabbed our 2024 avian headlines, but other interesting birds have been around throughout the year. Woodcock are often seen in the meadows in the winter:

Yellowhammer always start to gather at the end of winter:

But unfortunately this year there were no yellowhammer breeding territories here as far as we could tell. In previous springs the sound of yellowhammers singing from their favourite perches around the hedgerows became part of the soundscape, but in 2024 they were sadly silent. I hope that this was just a blip rather than a downward trend and that things will return to normal next spring.

In contrast, lots of starlings fledged here this year, whereas there had been none at all in evidence the year before:

Magpies also had a very successful breeding season as usual. There are far too many of them around for my liking:

I presume that herring gulls are nesting on the nearby white cliffs because we often see them gathering nesting material here:

Every year a pair of mallards come for some recuperation on our ponds. The female duck lays eight to thirteen large eggs over two weeks but is weakened by this energy-intensive process. So the male accompanies her wherever she goes to protect her whilst she is egg-laying. I find this very endearing.

The mallards only fly in to use the ponds and do not nest in the meadows. Any birds that do nest here have to contend with all our magpies and crows, who are very partial to a nutritious bird egg or chick:

We don’t often see siskin in the meadows:

Nor do we usually see stonechat:

For a while this partially leucistic jay was often appearing on the cameras:

Autumn is always an exciting time. Migrating birds stop over on their way out of the country:

It is also the season that the meadows get their annual cut. This exposes the small rodents, reptiles and invertebrates that had been living amongst the grasses and several species of birds of prey arrive to take advantage of this.

A kestrel, ringed in the meadows in September 2019, often hunts here and she has a surprisingly varied diet. She has a lizard below:

And a great green bush cricket here:

And also a mouse:

But she was most frequently seen eating an awful lot of voles. The vole population is cyclical with booms and busts, and 2024 did seem a particularly good year for them.

A barn owl was first seen in the meadows in the autumn of 2023, but this year the cameras had barn owls on them every night for a few weeks. I was delighted to notice that one bird had a ring on its right leg but another one definitely didn’t, which confirmed that there were two separate birds visiting. Here they both are putting their right legs forward for consideration:

Following this discovery that there were actually two barn owls, we have put a barn owl nest box up because wouldn’t it be fantastic to have nesting owls here someday?

The buzzard is another bird of prey that first landed in the meadows in 2023 and it was a regular visitor this autumn as well:

Its presence makes the magpies feel very uneasy though, and these photos make me smile:

As the autumn rolled on into winter, the birds of prey started to be seen less frequently. This most unwelcome visitor arrived instead and started to pull hibernating frogs out of the mud at the bottom of both ponds:

We have learned to be very wary of a grey heron because it’s just such an efficient hunter. A few years ago one cleared the wild pond of all its hundreds of frogs and newts as they gathered to mate, which was heart-breaking.

So we got our old scarecrow MacKenzie out of the shed and also built a second one, now called Dude, to stand sentinel by the side of both ponds:

The scarecrows have proved completely successful so far and the heron has not returned since they went out.

This brings me to the end of my review of the birds in the meadows in 2024. The year has been especially memorable for the breeding swifts and the influx of autumn raptors, but there has been a lot of other bird interest too. Part 2 of the review of the meadows, which will cover everything else, will arrive in the new year once I’ve written it!

Have a really Happy New Year from all in the meadows and let’s see what 2025 brings.

In the depths of these short winter days, when it’s cold and dark by 4 o’clock, it’s always such a pleasure to draw the curtains, put some music on and rummage through the photographs of the year, back to those halcyon days when the sun shone and there were interesting insects and young animals about. There are difficult decisions to be made about which photos will make the cut and be included in this summary of the last twelve months in the wood. Since taking on twelve acres of woodland five years ago, we have been on a journey of discovery, each year gaining a greater depth of understanding of how everything works and fits together, and here are my highlights for 2024:

1. Birds

At the edge of the wood there is an old cherry tree, speckled with multiple woodpecker holes, that has provided much interest over the years. In April the ground at the base of the tree was covered in wood chippings suggesting that some major excavation was going on in the trunk above:

We put a camera on a likely hole and were rewarded with many views of green woodpeckers releasing beakfuls of sawdust to float down to the ground:

We kept the camera trained on the hole and eventually started to see chicks looking out. How many were in there, though?

There were at least two of them:

But, in mid June, it was actually three chicks that successfully fledged:

And then, in August, we were delighted to see one of the spotty young birds out in the wood with its father:

Together with a neighbouring woodland, our wood is part of the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme and there are fifty dormouse nest boxes spaced throughout both woods which are surveyed monthly from April to November. Blue tits also like to use these boxes and, in May, twenty-five of the boxes contained blue tit nests:

The hole into the box is small and we had thought that blue tits and wrens were the only birds that could get into the box. This year, though, box 12 had something a bit more exciting going on – a brood of marsh tits, all of which fledged soon after this photo was taken:

I stumbled upon a brood of adorable just-fledged wrens in May. This one stayed around just long enough for me to take a photo:

Despite initially showing a lot of interest, the tawny owls lost out to the squirrels and did not nest in the tawny nest box again this year:

But we did see a lot of them at the ponds throughout the summer and what absolutely fabulous birds they are:

The bird list for the wood is not massive, but two new species were added this year, grey wagtail and firecrest, bringing the total to forty-five:

2. Woodland Mammals

2024 was the year that I finally obtained a dormouse disturbance licence from Natural England after several years of training. I can now legally check dormouse nest boxes unsupervised and don’t have to take up any more of my trainer’s time, although I will certainly miss her company.

It was quite a chilly spring and we found lots of torpid dormice – in April there were four and in May we found an amazing twelve torpid dormice in the boxes:

In June I did the tour of the boxes with another dormouse expert who was then prepared to be a second signatory on my disturbance licence application. On this tour we found a dead dormouse in one of the boxes, complete with this beautiful sexton beetle who would have been trying to bury the carcass had it been on the ground rather than in a box:

This dormouse, who had lost his tail, was found on the September tour:

Dormice live in low densities within a woodland, but nonetheless eighteen of them and many more empty nests were in the boxes in September, suggesting that the woods are wonderfully rich in dormice.

Every spring I put a camera on a hole in the ground that was used as a fox den back in 2022. This year there were some sweet baby rabbits living down there:

The foxes went elsewhere to raise their young:

The camera looking at the green woodpecker nest also caught some other interesting things:

2024 was a terrible year for squirrel damage to the trees with so many lovely beech and hornbeam being ringbarked and lost. I wasn’t at all pleased by this sight either in the tawny nest box where we were hoping to get nesting owls:

Although the main badger sett is elsewhere in the wider wood, we still see quite a lot of badger activity in our section. In all my years of using trail cameras to watch wildlife at ponds, I’ve never before seen a badger take a bath. This one had a good long wallow in the shallow pond and rubbed itself along the grass to dry off afterwards:

Badgers have a fine set of teeth as demonstrated in a skirmish here:

And here is one of this year’s cubs out in the daylight:

There were several sightings of polecat-sized mustelids during the year but the photos were never clear enough to be able to accurately assess their heritage:

There was also a much smaller weasel seen:

3. Reptiles and Amphibians

In September we showed the Kent County Recorder for reptiles and amphibians around the wood so he could assess it for its potential. As we entered a clearing that was made a couple of years previously, we surprised an adult female grass snake who was basking in the sun. She was over a metre long with a yellow collar and shot off in a tight S shape, giving me an enormous shock. We had never seen a snake in the wood or in the meadows before.

In January we found a toad hibernating under a sheet of corrugated iron which was very pleasing because this was a new species for the wood. We have now found it back in the same place this winter as well:

4. Invertebrates

The wood is covered in primroses in the spring which is a gloriously uplifting sight after the long winter. Primroses have long flower tubes with the nectar held at the very bottom, so it is solely long-tongued insects that can get at it. In the wood in March, only bee-flies and brimstone butterflies are on the wing and have a sufficient length of tongue:

Bugle is another spring flower much beloved by insects and there is now a lot of it growing in the wood as we create more clearings:

One clearing has marjoram flowering abundantly in the high summer and this plant is a big attraction for woodland butterflies. The silver-washed fritillary is probably the most exciting:

The sycamores’ leaves were covered in pale mottling this summer, caused by a tiny sycamore-specialist leafhopper, Eurhadina loewi, which could be seen on the undersides of the leaves and which seemed to have a bumper year in 2024:

This nationally scarce beetle, Oedemera femoralis, is a nocturnal beetle feeding on the pollen and nectar of ivy and willow. This one was found sheltering in a dormouse box during the day:

This is the first time I had seen a 14-spot ladybird. Several of the spots have fused together and it now looks for all the world like a grinning panda:

I love learning about the wacky lifecycles that many invertebrates have and this fly, Dryomyza anilis, is a badger latrine specialist. The males are territorial and guard their chosen latrines from other males as they wait for a female to come by.

We are hoping that 2025 will be a significant year in our woodland journey. We are going to commission a management plan from a forestry expert which will guide us through the next few years. The plan may well recommend cutting down the big but beautiful stand of silver birch in the centre of the wood that has reached maturity and could soon start to fall over – I am trying to prepare myself for this, but I love those trees.

So that completes my review of this year in the wood. All that is left now is to wish you a Happy Christmas – I hope you have a good one.

Our son and daughter-in-law visited us recently and brought us a very precious gift – some bunting that they had created along with one of their friends which features some of the animals from this blog. They had made lino cuts and then printed these onto paper – it must have taken them ages and I am totally delighted with it.

Six of the prints feature animals that have captured the headlines of the blog in 2024. Throughout the summer, dormice appeared in excellent numbers in the wood and green woodpeckers fledged three chicks from a hole in an old cherry tree:

Swifts raised two young in a swift box attached to the house and we saw a large and vigorous grass snake in the wood for the first time:

A pair of barn owls hunted in the meadows this autumn and our badgers had three cubs back in the spring:

It’s been another wonderful wildlife year and I am looking forward to reviewing it all properly as December comes to a close.

In the meantime, we have had another exciting first:

Never before have we seen a hedgehog in the garden. Over the past decade there have been very occasional sightings on the trail cameras in the meadows – not even as often as one a year – and never has one been spotted in the wood. It is safe to say that any glimpse of a hedgehog here is a momentous occasion. But when I was a child in Maidenhead in the 60s, they were such a normal sight that we ceased to really notice them. These maps from hedgehogstreet.org aren’t necessarily completely accurate but paint a pretty depressing picture of the UK’s hedgehogs:

However, amongst all that gloom, there is a small sliver of good news. It has been recently reported that, whilst rural hedgehog populations still continue to fall, urban populations may now have stabilised and might even be increasing. By improving connectivity between our gardens, not using harmful chemicals and putting hibernation boxes into our shrubberies, the householders of Britain could perhaps reinforce and improve this small recovery.

This particular householder has now positioned a hedgehog box into the base of a privet hedge just in case it could ever be of any use to our prickly friends:

We have gone round and removed old bird nests from most of the bird boxes in the meadows:

Something catastrophic must have happened with this blue tit nest that sadly got no further than the egg laying stage:

This is a vey cosy nest using all sorts of synthetic fluff, including yellows and pinks from the dog’s balls:

This next nest completely filled the box with the hole facing forwards. I am not completely sure what bird made this nest but the nesting material is quite coarse and my best guess is a house sparrow:

Pleasingly, nearly all of the boxes had a nest in them this year. Even those that didn’t have nests are now making themselves useful as overnight roosts on these cold winter nights:

One evening, it was nearly dark and I was drawing the curtains when I noticed this house sparrow entering a swift box to roost overnight:

Back in February 2021 there was a severe cold snap and Dave spotted a wren roosting in this novelty teapot bird box when he was out with the dog and a torch before bed. We put a camera on the box and discovered that it was going into the teapot at heavy dusk and leaving just before dawn each night:

I only have slim pickings to offer you from the trail cameras this week. A tawny owl, sparrowhawk and kestrel in the meadows…..

And a redpoll and a firecrest in the wood:

We had heard that the RSPB had decided to close the visitor centre and shop at their Dungeness reserve in the new year as a cost cutting measure and we wanted to see it for the last time before things changed. We once saw a pair of bittern flying past us there and this remains one of our most memorable bird sightings of all time.

Everyone we met was talking with sadness about the closure of the visitor centre and, once we got out onto the reserve itself, we found that several of the hides had been replaced with cheaper lookouts as well:

However, there were clear signs that one new hide is about to arrive which was good news – it can get very cold indeed at Dungeness:

Also very cheering was that a great deal of work is ongoing to create new islands in front of two of the remaining hides, Christmas Dell and Dengemarsh:

We noticed that the islands on the reserve are now protected with floating fences:

These fences were designed in Denmark and have been found to be very good at keeping mammals off the islands, thus protecting breeding seabirds. It is a rope with floats attached to make it buoyant and it is anchored in a number of places to keep it from moving. The predator mammal swims up to the rope but is unable to lever itself over it and most will not swim under it. Cheap, simple, unobtrusive and apparently effective.

It was a dull, grey day and we didn’t actually see many birds on our visit this time, other than the thousands of cormorants. We did see a few marsh harriers though:

And a great white egret:

So it is a time of great change at RSPB Dungeness. I completely understand that the charity needs to spend its limited funds wisely and I presume that this is what has motivated its closures. But the new islands and rafts that it has planned should be great once they are established and are a really positive thing. We will certainly return soon to see how things are getting on and, of course, we are forever hopeful of seeing those bittern again..

It was with great excitement that we first saw a barn owl in the meadows during the autumn of 2023. This autumn we have realised that there are now two barn owls hunting here, one with a ring on its right leg and the other without. Here they both are, putting their right legs forwards for inspection:

As soon as I knew that there were two of them, I could no longer resist ordering a barn owl nest box because I am forever an optimist in such matters. This box has now arrived and, like the two we already have up in the wood, it is very roomy and made out of sturdy recycled plastic:

A good site for the box in a copse of trees between the two meadows had been identified which would have a clear view out over the second meadow once we’ve hacked everything back a bit:

The heavy box was hauled into position with a mixture of winching up on a rope and pushing from below:

And here is our new barn owl home, ready for viewing by prospective tenants:

In the autumn, barn owls were appearing on the cameras every night. They are being seen much less frequently now, but are still occasionally here and I hope they might notice the new box:

A camera is now trained onto the box so, if there is any interest, we will know:

As we were working in the copse, a little chiffchaff was flitting in the trees above our heads, searching for insects. Although most chiffchaffs leave Britain in the autumn to overwinter in`Southern Europe and North Africa, an increasing number are now staying here instead, as I suppose this one must be:

We have bought a new trail camera, a Browning Recon Force Elite HP5, which is more than double the price of the Crenovas that we usually use. It has only just gone out into the meadows, but this seems to be a reasonable shot to have taken in pretty poor weather:

I am pleased to report that there have been no further heron sightings since the scarecrows went into action at both ponds:

Sparrowhawks have been very much in evidence this week:

And the ringed kestrel as well:

Tawny owls are being seen and heard too:

In the wood, we are hoping that the tawny owls will nest in this box next year. They nested in here in 2022 but have lost out to squirrels since then. Nice to see one showing an interest now though and hope that we will be lucky again in 2025:

The winter work in the wood kicked off this week with a first session of clearing the marjoram glade. Every year we cut down the dogwood that grows strongly there because, if left, it would quickly overwhelm all the wonderful marjoram. The dogwood has grown vigorously and tall this year but is still easily sliced through with the hedge cutter:

Bringing in the woodland butterflies and moths to the marjoram is what it is all about, and here are some that we have seen in previous summers:

Progress was made this week but it is quite a large area and it will take three or four more sessions before this job is completed:

As we worked, the winter sun was shining on the surrounding silver birch trees that are already covered in catkins. Now that the trees have dropped their leaves, the catkins will release pollen that can waft around freely, unimpeded by the foliage.

We were under observation by a little robin as we laboured on:

And the dog was quietly supervising from the comfort of back of the car:

I hate to see this poor chaffinch with what I think must be Chaffinch Viral Papilloma on its foot and leg. I’m not sure I’ve seen one as badly affected as this before:

The days are depressingly short at this time of this year, but this does have the benefit that we are awake to see the glorious sunrises over the sea such as this one this week:

Only another sixteen days now until we are over the tipping point and inexorably heading towards spring.

This week we did the final tour of the year around the thirty hazel dormouse boxes in our wood. In October, six dormice had been found in the boxes, but now in November we didn’t find a single one. They have all built winter nests down at ground level, where the temperature is less volatile, in which they will hibernate until spring.

Abandoned summer nests remain in ten of the thirty boxes and these will cleaned out over the winter.

Box 12 has excelled itself this year, I think:

Not only does it have that dormouse nest in it now, but on the May tour it had a brood of marsh tits:

We might not have found any dormice as we went round the boxes this week, but we certainly found a lot of slugs and millipedes. In box 28 we also found a pupal case and egg mass of the gypsy moth.

There was a British native gypsy moth, whose caterpillars ate just two species of plant and was generally very well behaved, but these went extinct in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, the European form then became established in London in the 1990s and has spread widely from there. These caterpillars are a problem because they eat a wide range of plants and can extensively defoliate trees and shrubs.

Even though she has a full set of wings, a female gypsy moth is flightless but emits a strong pheromone to bring a mate in to her. Because she is sedentary, she will then lay her eggs close to where she emerged from her pupa, as has happened in box 28. We will get some gloves on and scrape these eggs off before they hatch out in the spring.

As we walked round the wood this week, it was depressing to see how much squirrel damage there has been this year. So many trees have been ring-barked and killed – mostly the beautiful beech and hornbeam, but other tree species as well.

And practically every dormouse box shows that they have also been under attack from them:

Much work is being done to address the grey squirrel problem in the British Isles, but progress is slow and I can’t see there being a satisfactory resolution for the south of England in my lifetime. An up-to-date map has just been produced by UK Squirrel Accord showing red and grey squirrel distribution 2017-22:

I had always assumed that red squirrels had disappeared from most of England ages ago and was very surprised to see this comparison between 1945 and 2016 which shows that there were still some red squirrels in East Kent in 1945:

Back in the wood, movement at this badger latrine caught my attention when two or three flies flew away as I approached:

It was the flies that interested me because they were sizeable and red and I was fairly sure I hadn’t seen them before. I waited for one to return:

Unfortunately I didn’t have my macro camera with me to get a clear photo of something this size so I returned with it a couple of days later. I had to lie on my stomach and get my face much closer to the latrine than I would have wanted, but was rewarded with a photo that has enabled the fly to be identified as Dryomyza anilis:

Dryomyza anilis, the hooded Dryomyza, is a common and widespread fly, but just not in the places that you might usually look. The males are very territorial and stake out territories at woodland badger latrines and carrion where they hope to find a female and mate, laying their eggs into the decaying organic matter.

In my last post there were photos of woodcock, fieldfare and redpoll, all newly arrived at the wood for the winter. This time I have some more winter visitors. Firecrests, along with their more plentiful cousins the goldcrests, arrive in the UK in the autumn from their breeding grounds in Scandinavia:

Large numbers of blackbirds also arrive in November from the colder parts of Europe and over-winter here:

Last week we cleared out the large raptor boxes in the wood but unfortunately disturbed a tawny owl that was roosting in one of the boxes. We hoped that we hadn’t scared it away for good, and so it was reassuring to see a tawny back in the vicinity of the box again:

It was also nice to see the weasel still in the meadows after its recent encounter with the dog:

It was a bumper year for rabbits in the meadows last year but this year they seem to be back to their normally low numbers:

I remember this rabbit with that distinctive torn left ear from last year:

The ringed female kestrel is still in action in the meadows but we are definitely seeing less of the birds of prey here as autumn recedes and the weather worsens:

In my last post, a heron had started visiting the hide pond and demonstrated what a devastatingly effective hunter it is by catching several hibernating frogs:

Our scarecrow, Mackenzie, was rapidly brought out of the shed and put up by the pond:

And I’m pleased to report that no heron has been seen at the hide pond since he has gone up. However, we now see that the heron has simply moved down to the other pond:

Frogs are nocturnal and, if the moon is fullish and the sky clear, there is enough light for herons to hunt at night when the frogs are most likely to be moving around. Here is a heron down at the wild pond at 2.30 in the morning but, since it was minus three degrees, I hope that the water was frozen and that it had no success:

We do have some protective corrugated squares at the sides of this wild pond for the amphibians to hide under. These are very popular indeed in the summer but I am not sure if the frogs will be hibernating under them at this time of year – I suspect not:

Once we realised that the heron had moved to the other pond instead, we swiftly made a second scarecrow using some of Dave’s old clothes that he was prepared to donate to a good cause:

Storm Bert howled his way across the meadows last weekend. In the nick of time I moved pots of tender plants into the potting shed where they can now remain until the spring:

I like to think of them all safe and protected in there seeing out the winter, just as the onion, garlic and tulip bulbs are now planted into the allotment under a cosy blanket of compost:

We have probably finished most of the jobs we wanted to accomplish in the meadows before the start of winter. But, now that all the dormice are hibernating, it is time to turn our attention the wood where there is more clearing and coppicing to be done than we can ever hope to achieve. Although it’s hard work, being outside in the wood in the cold, short days of winter is actually really lovely and something we look forward to – especially when it also involves boiling water for tea over an open fire and sitting down with a reviving slice of Christmas cake.