NICK BAKER'S DARTMOOR WINTER
Nick Baker is a professional ‘amateur naturalist’ who loves all things
with a pulse (and quite a few things without!). He works as a TV
broadcaster, author, photographer and wildlife tour guide.
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Queen Hornet
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It’s relatively well known what a Dormouse is doing around about now:
it’s tallying up its annual seven months of shut-eye – hence its old
colloquial name ‘the seven sleeper’. The Hedgehog is pretty much doing
the same under your garden shed, or is balled up in a pile of brash or
leaves somewhere at the foot of a hedge. Bats are hung up like furry,
dewy baubles or stuffed into crevices in walls, caves or rot holes in
trees, depending on species.
But what about the others, that under-appreciated majority? Where
do all the insects go? They don’t have the muscle to head south with
the birds, but on a spring day – and sometimes through the winter
months – they seem to spontaneously appear.
It’s probably not that surprising to learn that many species of
invertebrate sit out this inclement season in various robust stages of
their life cycle: for many this would be in an insignificant egg jammed
into a bark crevice or, as is the case for grasshoppers and crickets,
deep in the soil.
Have a search around your outhouses or porches and you may find the
chrysalis of the Large White butterfly, self-sewn to a firm surface.
This strategy is a popular choice among many butterflies and moths. The
shiny mahogany sarcophagi – the pupae of several common moth species –
are often discovered while turning soil in the garden over the winter
season.
More unusual are species such as the Silver Washed Fritillary.
That grand butterfly of high summer lays its eggs on the bark of trees
near the caterpillars’ food plant: violets. In late summer these
hatched and immediately sought refuge in a crack or crevice in the bark
– without a square meal inside them. Next year’s Silver Washed
Fritillaries sit out the worst the Moor can throw at them as tiny,
empty scraps of caterpillars. As I walk the wintry woods I imagine just
how many of these barely living miniatures I’ve passed, jammed deep in
some recess. How and why they do this? Just another mystery of the
Moor.
Similarly, the Marsh Fritillary overwinters as a caterpillar. As
its name suggests it likes damp places, but risks being flooded out.
With the help of its siblings it spins a waterproof silken tent that
can survive being submerged: a caterpillar life-support capsule.
How do these creatures tolerate the cold? This permeating menace to
our warm-blooded lives is well understood, but if you are cold-blooded
and outside it’s a different story. Sub-zero temperatures will freeze
water, and the formation of expanding ice crystals in your cells would
be fatal.
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