December 2015

This is the last Nature Notes for 2015, and soon the television will be full of those dreadful ‘review of the year’ shows.  But there’s no need to worry, this won’t be a review of the natural year.  Nature is very much a ‘happening now’ subject and there’s usually too much going on right now to worry about what happened last month.  Besides, I have enough trouble remembering what happened last week anyway.  One thing that happened this week, however, was very memorable – I saw a badger!  Nothing remarkable about that you may say, but running across the lawn in the middle of the day, hours away from dusk?  It made me wonder why it was out in daylight and what had disturbed it.  Perhaps it was confused by this long drawn out autumn we are having – we’ve had the warmest October, and November also looks like setting records with a high of 22 deg. C in Wales on November the 1^st and two weeks of warm humid weather since then.  As I write this in mid-November there are still plenty of leaves left on the trees and we have Verbena, Fuchsia and ‘Bowles Mauve’ still in flower in the garden.  We even have a confused apple tree that put out a tentative bit of blossom a couple of weeks ago.

Eyed Hawkmoth

Hopefully, it will get colder soon and we’ll get some frost to slow down the garlic and ensure a good crop for next year.  Cold weather isn’t good for everything though, but most of the animals in your garden won’t experience that as they will have died weeks or even months ago.  Perhaps I should qualify that – by most, I mean numbers, and the largest number of visible animals in your garden are probably insects.  Most solitary insects like flies, midges, solitary bees and wasps, dragonflies and butterflies, have a very short life as an adult and may last only a few days or a few weeks at most.  These insects will have invested their future in eggs or larvae that will hopefully be in a safe place until spring warms enough to accelerate their growth process to become adults.  Not all insects do this though and there are some notable exceptions, especially larger insects like the winter damselfly and Peacock and Brimstone butterflies.  You would expect some of our larger moths like the hawkmoths to overwinter as well, but mostly this does not happen.  For many, like the convolvulus hawkmoth and pine hawkmoth, which are immigrant species, the UK moth book gives the stark message – unable to overwinter.  (For some, like the lime hawkmoth, the message is even more stark – does not feed.)  Most overwinter as a chrysalis – the privet hawkmoth sometimes twice.  The only hawkmoth I could find that overwinters as an adult is one of the smaller ones – the delightful humming-bird hawkmoth, which can cope with mild winters in the south west.

Convolvulus Hawkmoth

The social insects like bumblebees and wasps all die out in winter with the exception of mated queens that will carry the next generation as a packet of sperm in their abdomens.  Exceptions to this are the remarkable honey bee, that stores honey to keep the workers going over winter, and ants that are just basically tough and resourceful (and carnivorous) and stay underground.

One thing that prompted me to write about overwintering animals was curiosity about spiders and what happens to them at this time of year.   Sadly the answer is fairly boring – some overwinter as adults, and some don’t.  But while I was looking I found a very remarkable fact about spiders – they can fly!  And these are not just some exotic species shown to us by David Attenbrough from some jungle in South America, but things like our own British money spiders.  The spiderlings squirt enough silk from their spinnerets to form a sort of kite which is directed into the air in the hope of catching an up draught.  If successful, they let go of their perch and drift to wherever the wind takes them.  This is, of course, a risky strategy – they may end up in another spider’s web, or as a snack for swallows, or frozen at 30,000 feet, or even in the sea.  So why adopt such a strategy?  Well simply because staying around hundreds of other cannibalistic spiderlings is even more risky.

Humming-bird Hawkmoth

This picture of the humming-bird hawkmoth is a bit of a cheat in that I took the photo in Sicily.  In my defence I can confirm that I saw several this year from the kitchen window feeding on the verbena, but they had always gone by the time I got out with the camera.

Tree Bumblebee