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December 2025
December is the month when dormancy is key for nature at our latitude. Humans are lucky if we have a heated house to live in and a warm car or public transport to travel in during winter. It must have been very hard for early people living in rock shelters and simple shacks. Temperature regulation is a key survival factor in the animal world. Humans are mammals and we regulate our temperature internally to some extent at about 37℃, i.e. we are endothermic. Plants cannot usually regulate their temperature but rely on physiological chemistry to resist succumbing to the cold. Most British plants become dormant, either by retreating underground into bulbs like daffodils or corms like crocuses. Or else die back to a woody skeleton like deciduous trees. Conifers, like other evergreen trees, resist frost by producing chemicals within their needles or leaves which act as antifreeze. Some moths, e.g. the winter moth (Operophtera brumata) have ethylene glycol in their blood. This is the same chemical that is put into combustion car engines to prevent cooling water from freezing. Indeed, we may see male winter moths flying at night in December, illuminated by car headlights as they search for an aromatic wingless female to mate with. Once mated, the female climbs up the closest oak tree and lays her eggs near the leaf bud on the tree that fed her as a caterpillar. She then dies. Many adult insects die as pray or freezing, leaving frost-resistant eggs dormant until spring. Or, if hatched as larvae during summer, have metamorphosed into pupa to sleep out the winter, as some adults also do in a frost-free nook or cranny before emerging as an adult in spring. A few insects migrate as some birds do. Like us, birds are endothermic, holding their body temperature at about 41℃.
Insects such as fleas spend the winter in the direct company of their endothermic host animal, which could be a bird or mammal. Reptiles such as lizards and snakes or amphibians such as frogs and newts, like invertebrates such as slugs and spiders are exothermic. They are entirely dependent on the external temperature for active life, so they will go into dormancy, i.e. hibernate. Some spiders have adapted to humans and are happy to live in peoples houses all winter such as the domestic house spider (Tegenaria domestica). This is the one that is sometimes seen running across the floor in a warm sitting room on a winter’s evening. Or else there is the cosmopolitan cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides), sometimes called daddy long legs. These tiny animals with long spindly legs hide in ceiling corners or behind furniture and make long random cobwebs which catch small insects such as mosquitos and house flies.
Few mammals hibernate. Bears (Ursus sp.) do, reducing their body temperature from 37.7℃ to about 31℃. Dormice drop their body temperature to that of their surroundings optimally between 1 and 4 ℃, where the least amount of energy is consumed. Their heart and breathing rate drop by about 90%!
Southern Gas Networks
Gas Network Upgrade – Snatts Road
Public Statement on
Local Planning Matters
November 2025
November is a strange month for British wildlife. Rarely cold enough for snow here in the south, and yet chilly and often damp. Most leaves have dropped from the deciduous trees by its end, and most insects have died or are overwintering as eggs, hibernating adults or pupae, or have migrated south. Earthworms, (mainly Lumbricus terrestris) are tunnelling in the soft wet soil and are dragging in dead leaves to make new food for them. They often partially emerge from their tunnels and ‘rain-bathe’ during wet nights. November is probably the highlight month of the year for humble earthworms. They are hermaphrodites (all both male and female) but do not mate with themselves, but form partnerships with neighbours. They live up to 7 years and continuously breed by mating once every 7 – 11 days. This in turn is welcomed by badgers, whose main food is earthworms. There are 29 species of earthworm in Great Britain. These animals are essential for maintaining the quality of the c. 50 cm soil depth required to grow our food and maintain our natural environment.
If, like me, you have one of the Wealden District Council issued black cone Rotol Compost Converters for dealing with kitchen waste, you will probably see within it a different, small reddish worm extatically reproducing and munching your waste every time you lift the lid. These are known as manure worms or red wriggler worms (Eisenia fetida). They do a great job of decomposing food waste. We never put any kitchen waste in our normal domestic dustbin. One binman commented to me recently that we always only have one small bag of waste in our black bin. However, our recycling green bin is another matter. So much single use plastic and cardboard. We are so fortunate to have a district council that helps us to be environmentally friendly.
Sticking with the reproduction of invertebrates and weather, let’s go back to the warm summer that we have just had. As temperatures fall, we will be seeing fewer honeybees now. However, as worms love wet November nights to mate, honeybees love a warm calm sunny day to go on their nuptial flight. The colony will produce a batch of virgin queens and male bees (drones) during late spring and summer. Between 1 and 4 pm on a warm (18 – 19 °C or more) afternoon, drones from many colonies will form assemblies which attract the virgin queens who will mate, on the wing, with as many drones as possible and store the multiple sperm where her sting is in her abdomen. This ensures genetic diversity. Males have no sting, but the process of mating explodes their abdomen, so it is the last thing they ever do. The now fertilized queen returns to her natal hive. This successful queen will stay in the hive, laying eggs, while any other sister queens in the hive are often eliminated by her or the workers or may leave the hive with a swarm led by the old queen to a new location.
Bird in Eye North
and submitting comments
Framfield Nursery
Application No: WD/2024/2941/MRM
Speaking at a Wealden DC Planning
and submitting comments
Bird in Eye Hill, Framfield
Roadworks
October 2025
Just as an addendum to September Nature Notes, January (named after the Roman god Janus, who was the god of beginnings, endings, doorways, and transitions) and February (from the Latin word februum or februare, meaning “to purify,” and from Februa, a Roman festival of purification and atonement held mid-month). These were added to the monthly calendar by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, around 713 BC. The additions were made to account for the full lunar year and the period of winter that was previously left unassigned. This part of ancient Rome’s lunar calendar considered winter to be a monthless period, which originally only had ten months starting with March. The word ‘month’ should be ‘moonth’ as a lunar month accounts roughly as the period from one ‘new moon’ to the next, which is approximately 29.5 days. This period is also called a synodic month and represents the time it takes for the Moon to go through all its phases and return to the same alignment with the Earth and Sun. A harvest moon is when the moon is particularly bright, such that farmers can harvest crops during the night and usually occurs in September, but sometimes early October.
August, September and October are months when many birds migrate south to escape the short cold days of winter. Maybe the most remarkable of these is the arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea), which breeds in the northern Arctic zones and spends the winter in the Antarctic. I am also fascinated by cuckoos (Cuculus canoris), who never meet their biological parents, but instinctively know where and when to go (Africa) for the winter after fledging in late summer. Other bird species can at least migrate in mixed age groups, often with their parents, but most cuckoo adults leave Europe in June before their offspring have fledged the host’s nest. The other thing to look out for in the autumn is spiders’ webs. They often show up with dew or frost in cold mornings. Most insects die at the end of the summer, and nature is never wasteful, there is always a use for its products. Some insects lay eggs, and then die with the first frosts or are eaten by spiders or birds. Others hibernate as larvae, pupae or adults, and some such as painted lady (Vanessa cardui) butterflies migrate south like some birds.
One of my specialities is the blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). I studied how they planned their families to optimise breeding success for my doctorate. What I found has been published in my book called ‘The Blue Tit’. One relevant thing is that female British blue tits often migrate for short distances, maybe 100 miles or so from where they bred, usually southwest and near the coast. The south-west of England is probably the warmest place on our island in the winter due to the relatively warm Atlantic Conveyer current flowing from the Gulf of Mexico to Britain. Male blue tits tend to remain at their nesting sites.