Tristan Gooley

So if there's a narrow window of like a week of mild weather in spring, smaller animals have evolved a kind of smash and grab strategy.

They're like, let's go for it.

You know, we can get through, you know, the whole reproductive sort of part in this small window.

So it makes sense for small, you know, warm patches, for small animals to go for it, whereas the bigger ones, the whole cycle's too long, so there's no bother trying to jump on a little temperature change.

I talk about the clear phase in June, where if you've got a patch of fresh water you get to look at regularly, a pond or a lake or something like that, what you'll notice is at some times of the year, it looks quite murky and sometimes it looks transparent.

And that's part of a seasonal rhythm that lots of people don't spot, but it's very easy to spot in June.

What happens is in spring as the temperatures, as things warm, the algae start reproducing and we get a kind of murky appearance in fresh water.

Then the tiny animals, they have their spike in June and they slightly overtake the algae and they gobble it all up, basically.

And then the water just suddenly goes very clear in June.

So it's ecologists, you know, know it as the clear water phase in June.

It's where just fresh water just suddenly goes very clear.

It only lasts a few weeks.

Very easy to spot if you look for it, but hardly anybody knows to look for it.

One of the great joys of looking for clues and signs in nature is that we are not tied to living nature.

So abiotic nature is just as fascinating.

So once we get into autumn and winter, what we find is a whole series of maps made from things like dew on the ground, frost and mists.

So if we just take mists as one example,

It's very easy to kind of look at a landscape.

You see some mist in one place and not in another and just go, well, that's just kind of random.

But nothing is random in nature.