Circle of life a source of wonder and fascination
As many people discovered, and are still discovering, during the stay-home forced upon us by the corona virus pandemic, nature watching can be a source of pleasure and inspiration.
Last winter a Garden Snail discovered one of our bird boxes and moved in. It seemed a great choice of hibernation site: snug, safe from predators, totally sheltered from wind and rain and especially from frost as ice crystals in the creature’s watery body could prove fatal.
However, it moved out again for some unknown reason. I say ‘it’ because snails are hermaphrodite: it is their natural condition to have both male and female sex organs, so any individual is neither a ‘he’ nor a ‘she’ but an ‘it’.
It’s hard to understand why the wandering snail would vacate what to human eyes seemed to be an ideal home. Anyway, it did. Winter passed, spring arrived, and Blue Tits moved into the box, built a mossy cup of a nest and lined it with hair, down and feathers.
The female laid what looked like up to a dozen tiny white eggs speckled with small spots and/or larger blotches of reddish-brown. After doing all the nest building on her own, and laying the large clutch of eggs she settled down to do the two week stint of incubating the eggs also on her own.
The male wasn’t entirely useless; his role was to bring food to his partner and to feed her during her confinement. He also shared the job of feeding their offspring as they grew. All went well for them; the nestlings fledged and flew away.
The nest box wasn’t empty for long; a female bumblebee moved it, tunnelled under the empty Blue Tit nest and made herself at home there. A large spider moved in shortly afterwards, built an elaborate tunnel retreat in one corner and covered the interior of the box with an untidy tangle of cobwebs.
The young queen bumblebee bumbled about, her portly body breaking the silken threads as she came and went. She must have tired of the tangling nuisance as she left after a week or so. The spider then spun silk to his heart’s content and now sits waiting in his retreat for any hapless insect that may fly in the entrance hole of the nest box.
The circle of life continues to rotate, each individual incident a source of wonder and fascination to the nature watcher.