Winter Animals of Wilderness Wood

It is late December and winter is really setting in. Surely no self-respecting creature is going to show itself at this time of year! A nice long hibernation sleep sounds pretty attractive to me. But not so. Temperatures are still above zero for most of the day and there is still food to be found if you know where to look.

Today I arrive at Wilderness Wood at that strange, almost forgotten, time of year between the Winter Solstice/Christmas and the New Year. Most humans are hibernating at this time of year, perhaps sleeping off their festive blow-outs, or just slumped over the office desk waiting for something to happen.

However, out here in the woods life goes on in earnest. The woods appear quiet, largely because only members are permitted access until they reopen again at the end of January, but members of the animal community (or at least their signs) are everywhere.

I start off by visiting the old Marquee Meadow, the part of Middle Paddock that sits on a fairly steep slope. Middle Paddock is a pretty uninspiring level section of the wood dominated by vegetation that can take heavy trampling whenever an even takes place here. Call it an ecologically sacrificial area which hopefully takes people pressure off the woodland that makes up the remaining 60 acres of Wilderness Wood. Even so, I'm keen to encourage new species to colonise the near monoculture of grass and clover.

Marquee Meadow however pre-dates Middle Paddock and is much more interesting. Here the soil is very low nutrient due to the slopes steepness and it is much richer in acid lowland grassland species which will hopefully one day invade the adjacent Middle Paddock desert. I immediately spot signs of deer littering the ground. The deer come and go leaving their droppings, but it is not them that excites me at this moment. Much more interesting is a 1 centimetre hole in the turf (circled below).

Deer droppings and (circled) hole

I'm pretty sure I know who might have made it and quick as a flash take out my spade and extract a divot. My suspicions are proved correct, it is a hole made by a minotaur beetle. I am delighted because I encountered this lovely little creature last year in our other area of acid lowland grassland at Bat Park (see post 20/02/2024)

Minotaur beetles are not particularly common round this part of the world, but Wilderness Wood is turning into something of a Mecca for them. They normally collect rabbit droppings once they have dug their holes and place them alongside their larvae to feast on. I suspect the digger of this hole was itself a larva in one of the holes made at Bat Park last year. The minotaurs are on the march it seems! (see video clip below).

Nearby several fresh mole hills reveal that Talpa europaea has been active over the last few hours. He doesn't dig in the low nutrient acid lowland grassland area, but is active where the new nutrient rich soil provided for germinating Middle Paddock's grass seed also encourages his prey – the earthworm.

Fresh mole hills indicate someone is busy underground where the soil is relatively warm

My next stop has to be Bat Park. Here I am drawn to the small pond created by intercepting the surface runoff which trickles down after heavy rainfall. I just made a low dam and the resultant hollow holds water outside of the warmer months of the year. I have seen honey bees and other insects gathering to drink here, or to collect mud for building purposes. No sign of any insects today though – too cold!

However, I do find a few rabbit droppings, still dark and fresh. Benjamin Bunny passed this way recently. We can find further evidence of his visitations nearby where a clump of young heather has been cropped to within 1 cm of the soil. Sitting in the middle of the heather are the remains of an earthball it's mass of spores now long gone, scattered by rain splash. I'm sure we'll find some more pristine ones nearby.

Well cropped heather and the remains of an earthball fungus

Unsurprisingly there are lots of Minotaur Beetle holes to be found in the bare soil here also. Such is the availability of rabbit poo that I find 3 holes within a few inches of each other.

I have been running a little experiment excluding rabbits from a couple of 2 metre square plots (exclosures) in this recently created grassland. Most of the grassland is well grazed by rabbits but inside one of the rabbit exclosures the grass is much longer and provides ideal vegetation for spiders to spin their webs and snare flying insects. Probably not much spider food around at this time of year, but they look very pretty covered in spangled jewels where dew has collected.

Largely redundant insect traps adorn the longer grass

I wander around the heathland section of Bat Park and find what I was looking for – a pristine example of an earthball. These fungi appear from October onwards and look like a discarded scaly-skinned potato. This one will soon split open and go the same way as the one found earlier.

An earthball fungus ready to split open

Leaving Bat Park to the rabbits I search the adjacent conifer plantation for tell-tale signs of perhaps our most obvious mammal at Wilderness Wood – the grey squirrel. It doesn't take long to find some of his discarded cones, their scales ripped off and their seeds consumed, like a ruddy complexioned corn on the cob.

Discarded conifer cones indicate the grey squirrels are not going hungry

All this talk of eating is starting to make me feel hungry. I reckon it's time to be going back home and having some left-over gammon from Boxing Day. Perhaps a bit of Christmas Cake to follow?

Happy New Year!

David Horne 31/12/24