Day and Night
Who is awake in the sunshine, who slips out after dark — and why wildlife takes turns across the hours of the day.
Step outside at noon and you meet one cast of creatures; step out again after dark and you meet a completely different one. This ready-made collection sorts British wildlife into the day shift, the night shift, and the dawn-and-dusk animals in between, looks at how each is built for its own time, and asks why nature shares out the hours this way. Open it in your Resource Pack to explore, print, or share.
This fills your Resource Pack with these resources, ready to explore, edit, print or share.
What you’ll explore
- Animals divide up the hours: some are active in daylight (diurnal), some at night (nocturnal), and some at dawn and dusk (crepuscular), and familiar British creatures can be named in each group.
- Daytime animals are built for the light — sharp colour vision, and, for cold-blooded creatures like a lizard, the warmth of the sun needed before they can move and hunt.
- Night animals are built for the dark — large light-gathering eyes, keen hearing and smell, sensitive whiskers, and, in bats, echolocation.
- Dawn and dusk are a busy crossover time when day and night animals overlap, and some creatures, like the fox and the barn owl, specialise in this half-light.
- Wildlife shares out day and night for real reasons — finding enough food without everyone competing at once, keeping away from predators, and avoiding the fierce midday heat or the cold of the night.
A suggested path
1 · About this pack
A quick overview of what's inside and the big idea it explores.
2 · Why day, why night?
Behind the two shifts lies the turning Earth, the Sun and the Moon — and the reasons animals split the hours, so that not everyone is hunting the same food in the same place at the same time.
3 · Built for the dark, built for the day
How bodies are tuned to the clock — the big eyes, keen ears, nose and whiskers of a night animal, a bat's echolocation, the day-flying butterfly set against the night-flying moth, and a night creature's daily routine.
4 · Out in the daylight
The day shift — creatures you meet when the sun is up, from a singing robin and a basking lizard to the butterflies and bees that need daylight and warmth to fly.
5 · The night shift
After dark a different cast appears — an owl, a hedgehog, a badger, a bat, a wood mouse and a moth, all built to find their way and their food without the sun.
6 · Dusk and dawn — the in-between
At twilight the two worlds overlap: a fox crosses the lawn, deer and rabbits come out to graze, a barn owl quarters the fields, and the noctule bat appears before the sun has even set.
7 · Wonders from far away
Two creatures that show the rule is really about light and heat: a snowy owl that hunts by day under the endless Arctic sun, and a fennec fox that waits for the cool of the desert night.
Things to try
- Nocturnal watch: on a dry, still evening, sit quietly by a window or outside as the light fades and note who appears and when — a hedgehog snuffling, a bat flickering past, a fox slipping across the garden.
- Day-and-night sort: make two lists, 'awake by day' and 'awake by night', drop familiar animals into them, then puzzle over the tricky ones — the fox, the barn owl — that really belong in the gap between.
- Shadow clock: push a stick upright into the ground on a sunny day and mark where its shadow falls each hour, watching it swing, shrink and grow — a way to see the slow turning that makes day become night.