These animals look like cars parked in the autumn sunshine. They look harmless enough, but they have some gruesome secrets.
What are they and what are they doing? They are called cluster flies, and they are warming their bodies in the sun, before flying to feed on the fruits of the wood.
They are having adventures in time and space in Nowhere Wood. Life in the wood is dangerous and the animals are busy being alive: feeding, drinking and staying warm.
The animals certainly look like flies: with one pair of wings, a large head and huge compound eyes. Look closer and you might see their mouthparts, sucking water from the surface of the leaf.
The flies have lived their whole lives in Nowhere Wood. Their mothers laid their eggs in the soil last autumn. In the Spring, the eggs hatched to release larvae into the soil that burrowed into the bodies of earthworms.
They spent the early summer feeding on the worms before pupating. The adults emerged in the early summer, killing their earthworm hosts.
The flies are in a hurry to breed before it goes colder, later in the month. They are becoming mature enough to produce the next generation of flies.
Then the cycle of ‘being and becoming’ will begin again.
There is safety in numbers. The main predator of these flies is a type of wasp. There are twenty pairs of eyes looking out for danger and when one senses the wasps, they all fly away.
Life is so uncertain in Nowhere Wood. As well as wasps, the air contains the spores of dangerous fungi, that can infect and grow inside the adults, eating them up from the inside! In spite of the dangers, enough cluster flies survive to breed to be present in the wood next year.
Life is an uncertain adventure for the cluster flies, the earthworms, the wasps and the fungi. Everything is connected in Nowhere Wood.
- Suggest why cluster flies need to warm their bodies in the morning, before they can fly.
- Suggest why there is safety in numbers.
Every year, the snowdrop is the first plant to flower in Nowhere Wood. It is a symbol of the birth of Spring, bringing good cheer and hope at the end of a long winter. This is one reason why people plant snowdrops in their gardens.
Snowdrops are tougher than they look: they can grow through ice and snow. Their leaves have hardened edges that act as snowploughs and their cells contain a snowdrop antifreeze that stops ice crystals forming. The real secret of the snowdrop’s success is found below the ground, in the frozen soil. There, in the darkness, is a bulb, full of food made in last Spring’s photosynthesis. Like a battery, it is an energy store, so that the plant can start to grow in the weak winter sunshine.
This means that the plant can make leaves to grow in the warming Sun. The leaves make food to store in its bulbs ready for next year. Snowdrops do all of this before the leaves of the big trees open to steal the light, so that the floor of the wood becomes shaded. By then, the work of the snowdrop is over and it can wait for the next winter.
In is late November and the cells that will divide to make the new leaf are protected safely inside the 
Soon, the cells take up water and get much larger. They escape the protection of the bud and the new leaf 
The leaf is a factory for making sugar. Like any factory, it has a source of energy and transport systems to get the raw materials into the factory. It also moves the manufactured sugar out to the places in the plant where it is needed. The heart of the factory is the production line where sugar is made. These are called 
Gradually, in the autumn, when the days get cooler and shorter, the sugar factories are shut down and abandoned. The chloroplasts lie in ruins as everything useful is recycled back into the branches of the tree. All that remain are the frameworks of cell walls, turning brown as they dry in the autumn air.
Finally, the oak tree makes a special layer of cells that separates the old leaf from the stem, and the leaf is ready to fall when the wind blows strongly. The fallen leaves are not wasted, becoming energy stores for the organisms that feed on them. Next year’s buds are forming and wait for spring and the production of new leaves.
When you next look into a mirror ask yourself if you are the same person as you were yesterday. Well, of course you are.
So, when your friend sees you after ten years and calls out your name, there is not a single part of your body that was the same as when you last met. You have been completely remade and