21/12/2024
December’s wildlife highlights in The New Forest
While December is a time of celebration for us, life can be hard for wildlife in the winter. For many small birds and mammals, finding enough food to survive takes up almost every hour of daylight. The winter solstice, sometimes called Midwinter Day, occurs on 21 December this year: this is the shortest day in the calendar.
The foxes’ mating season is beginning, and you might hear the eerie screams and wails of the females and the barking ‘wow-wow-wow’ calls of the males.
Both male and female robins hold a territory throughout the cold wintry months, and both therefore regularly sing at this time of year. Some other birds have winter territories too, including the grey plovers (a type of wader) that feed on coastal mudflats. Tawny owls (main photo) are approaching their noisiest period: listen out for their hoots as they begin their courtship displays.
Many birds roost together for warmth and safety. These include starlings, finches, winter-visiting thrushes, rooks, jackdaws, carrion crows, pied wagtails and even wrens. The best time to track down bird roosts is from an hour before sunset, when you can see numerous birds all flying in the same direction towards their communal sites.
Even in midwinter, you can still find a few flowers on the heathland gorse bushes and on the butcher’s broom (an evergreen shrub) in the woodlands. Most fungi fruiting bodies have been killed off by the cold, but bracket fungi on trees such as birch are often much tougher and last from one year to the next.
Broad-leaved trees are now leafless and the shape of their trunks and branches is more obvious. See if you can identify them by their shape, the texture of their bark and by the colour, shape and arrangement of their buds.
Evergreens are of course still green in winter — look especially for conifers such as pines and spruces (including the Norway Spruce that is the traditional Christmas tree). Holly, ivy and mistletoe also have leaves through the winter and often feature in our Christmas celebrations. Only the female holly tree has red berries and many of these will already have been eaten by the birds.
Mistletoe is parasitic; it does have leaves that photosynthesise, but it also takes water and nutrients from its host tree. Its fruits are food for birds that also spread the seeds to other trees where they may take root.
Very few insects fly around in December. The exception may be clouds of male gnats dancing in the hope of attracting a passing female. Most insects pass the winter as eggs, larvae or pupae.
With so much of our “day” taken up by night time, a clear sky in December is well worth making the most of the opportunity for some star gazing, with the added bonus of the Geminid meteor shower whose meteors are very bright, moderately fast, and are unusual in being multi-coloured – mainly white, some yellow and a few green, red and blue. In 2024, the Geminid meteor shower will be active between 4-20 December and will peak on 14-15 December, at which time over 100 meteors per hour may be seen.
During mild winter weather, bats and hedgehogs will break their hibernation to forage for food. Sadly it’s believed that between 30 and 60 percent of bats and hedgehogs do not make it through to spring — although too late for the creatures this winter, it’s worth buying a friend (or yourself) a hedgehog hibernation box for Christmas, ready for next year!
