October 2012

The days are getting dramatically shorter now as we enter the season of autumn, in the old days known as fall.  Spiders seem to be everywhere with new webs every day to walk through.  They are mopping up the insects before the frosts come to kill them off.  Honey bees and hover flies are making the most of the ivy flowers which yield copious amounts of nectar at this time of the year.  The robins seem to call tip tip tip every day, and sing when most birds are relatively quiet.  Dormice are attempting to grow fat on the mellow fruitfulness spoken about by John Keats in his poem ‘To Autumn’ 1820:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

While the insects buzz their way into spider’s webs, the birds are changing guard with the summer visitors flying south and the winter visitors arriving to make the most of our unfrozen mudflats and lush berries.  Reptiles and amphibians will all go into hibernation, as will the dormice, hedgehogs and bats.  Those insects that do not die will either hibernate or fly south like the painted lady and red admiral butterflies.  Many spiders will hibernate, and can be seen with a torch on mild winter nights hunting on trees.  The birds wintering in Britain will tough it out, as will most terrestrial mammals like foxes which grow a winter pelt of fur to keep themselves warm.