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

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

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

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

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

1. Birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Invertebrates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Other things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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