By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The Wildlife Gardener doesn't do January. It's cold, damp and bereft of creatures and growth. Frustrating too, as the seed catalogues and packets arrive full of pictures and promise of luscious veg to get planting and sprouting, but then it's at least two months before anything can be usefully sown.

Washing flower pots, emptying compost bins and planting early broad beans in pots (some of which mice ate) are about the limits of gardening activities in January. Anoraky things like plot rotation planning on graph paper can be done, but that is nowhere near as satisfying as being outside in wellies, wielding spades and machinery.

February used to be just like January, and the Wildlife Gardener liked it even less. But in recent years, it has been the herald of spring. If that's what climate change has done to February, bring it on! Last year February was unseasonably warm, and this year it has been unseasonably sunny. I ambled past daffodils and crocuses to the Wildlife Pond this week, and almost leapt backwards in surprise as it churned like a jacuzzi.

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Last week's sheet of covering ice has gone and the pond is full to the brim with fresh-out-of-hibernation copulating amphibians: pairs of frogs and wall-to-wall newts gettin' it on.

A huge great diving beetle (Dytiscus marginalis) motorlaunched past. With the presence of all this fauna, I couldn't resist getting a net out and prodding around in a quiet bit of the pond. And what a fearsome creature I pulled out:

Great diving beetle larva

It's the larva of the great diving beetle. And yes – those are not the jaws of a vegetarian. This is a voracious predator, feeding on tadpoles and larvae of various other pond dwellers. The most scary predator in the pond? Maybe. But then on further inspection, a nearby dragonfly larva had obviously eaten one for breakfast:

I should clarify that here this dragonfly nymph is large and the beetle larva small. If it had been the other way round, the beetle larva would have been satiated with a meal of juicy small dragonfly flesh. Something had to feed today.
So let's hear it for the dragonfly. Beautiful, fragile, aerobatic. Able to withstand extremes of temperature: I threw some pondweed and lots of grass clippings into my super-hot composting bin last year. After a week I lifted the lid, recoiling from the heat and steam shimmering up from the rapidly-cooking mass. When the vapour cleared, a pair of plaintive compound eyes stared up at me. A dragonfly nymph, obviously imported in the pondweed, had fought its way up through the heated clippings, survived the temperature, and was ready to go home. I released the little naiad back into the pond. As it swam robustly away, none the worse for being semi-sautéed, I knew just how these remarkable creatures have survived for 300 million years.