The morning is drear. That particular greyness of deep winter is hanging over the Fens as though the sun were swaddled in layers of sodden muslin. My mood lowers with the skies, but I know there will be scraps of solace in the wood, if only I can muster the motivation to get there. With at least six weeks before the first signs of spring emerge in the hedgerows, my energy levels are at their lowest. Seasonal affective disorder weighs down my thoughts.
Dark puddles lie on the track and the mud is gluey and thick. Colour is sparse, the last of the haws have been blackened by ice crystals, and every green seems exhausted. A left-hand path is marked by an apple tree, its tightly closed buds showing no signs of swelling. I dawdle for a moment by a stand of blackberries, remembering the sharp-sweet harvest last August.
As I make to walk on, I see a glimmer of colour, a small flash of orange-red. A rosehip? A Viburnum lantana leaf? Neither. Nestled in a curled blackberry leaf are 11 native seven-spot ladybirds. This is a hibernaculum: a winter sleeping place. In the autumn, these beetles release chemical signals, triggered by lower temperatures and shorter day length, that cause them to gather in places where frost will not penetrate: the fibrous baskets of wild carrot seedheads, beneath the crook of a wild rose branch, but most commonly in the small vegetal tunnels of curled leaves. Their metabolism will slow, they’ll enter torpor and remain motionless until spring.
With the sight of the ladybirds comes elation, a welcome burst of dopamine, as though the blackberry bushes were still fruiting and I’d discovered tens of berries there; as though I’d found a piece of Baltic amber gleaming on Walberswick beach, as I did one previous January. This cache of ladybirds is treasure and the promise of spring. I know there are many tens of hibernacula in the woods, thousands of sleeping beetles waiting to be roused by the first warm day.
• The Wild Remedy: How Nature Mends Us - A Diary by Emma Mitchell, published by Michael O’Mara Books, is out now
