When you see a spider do you go Oh, Ugh or Aaaaaaaaarh? Wherever you are on that ladder of reaction, let me try and talk you down to a rung where you might just say Hi oreven Wow! Fear of spiders (arachnophobia) is quite common. It could be a primitive instinct evolved when our distant ancestors lived in caves in Africa and might have trodden on seriously poisonous spiders. Or maybe we learn it as children from nursery rhymes like the one about Little Miss Muffet, who was put her off her curds and whey by an abseiling spider. But relax. None of the common spiders in the UK are dangerous to humans. Certainly not those big house spiders that can appear overnight in the bath or dash across the living room floor at an impressive top speed of half a metre a second; nor the Daddy Longlegs that get into odd corners of rooms and twizzle rapidly in their untidy webs; nor all those tiny spiders that balloon around on invisible filiaments of silk – on the contrary, these are the ‘money spiders’ that are supposed to bring you good luck.
Orb Web Spider. Photo: Laurie Forsyth
Most of the UK’s 650 species of spider – bet you didn’t realise there were so many – live outside anyway. Among the wonders of autumn are those soft , misty mornings when you go out into the garden and see a perfect spider’s web outlined with beads of dew. The architecture of these silvery webs is breath-takingly beautiful. The spider first puts in the spokes to establish the structure and tether it securely to its moorings, then adds the complex spiral strands with a special sticky kind of silk that will trap unwary insects. The spider herself has anti-stick feet – all eight of them – to navigate the web. As a construction material the silk has extraordinary properties. It’s five times stronger than steel, weight for weight, but so light in density that a strand of spider’s silk stretched right round the earth would still only weigh the same as a bag of sugar. You can make bullet-proof vests from spider’s silk. It has medical uses, too, as a gentle anti-septic for binding wounds. Miss Muffet may in real life have been the daughter of the famous sixteenth-century naturalist, Dr Thomas Muffet, who discovered this property. Shakespeare knew about it anyway. In his Midsummer Night’s Dream he refers to the curative powers of one of Titania’s attendant fairies called Cobweb (‘Cob’ is the old name for spider). And we honour spiders, at least metaphorically, by naming one of the most important modern inventions after their magical creations – the World Wide Web.
Jeremy Mynott 7 October 022
Village Voices Nature Notes: Moth Matters
I’ve had some big game in the garden at night recently – two elephants, three tigers and a leopard for starters. Also a menagerie of smaller creatures, including: a fox, puss, kitten, mouse, some tabbies, several hummingbirds and peacocks, lots of pugs and even a shark, though I’m still hoping for my first lobster and goat. No, this isn’t some radical Shingle Street rewilding exercise; these are just a few of the weird and wonderful names of the moths that grace our gardens every night and lurk unseen in them by day. Mention moths and most people immediately think of clothes moths. These are the moths referred to in the Bible, where we are advised not to lay up our treasures on earth ‘where moth and rust doth corrupt’. But there are only two kinds of clothes moths in the UK – really tiny ones, and in any case it’s their larvae (caterpillars) that cause the problem. You might be amazed just how many other kinds of moths there are out there – some 2,500 kinds in the UK as a whole. And with the expert help of Nick Mason, our local moth-er (don’t forget the hyphen), I’ve found a remarkable tally of over 350 different species just in my own back garden. Most moth species were first identified and named by naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and they bequeathed to us this wonderful lexicon of names, not just the animal ones mentioned above but a whole treasure-house of footmen, quakers, wainscots, rustics, lutestrings, carpets, fanfoots, tussocks, darts and daggers. There are also some wittily intriguing ones like the Uncertain, the Suspected and the Confused. How splendid to know that we have living amongst us a Setaceous Hebrew Character, a Pebble Prominent and the lovely Merveille du Jour.
Peppered moth. Photo: Jeremy Mynott
Moths matter. They’re an index of the health of our environment. Readers of my generation will remember the ‘moth snowstorms’ we used to get years ago on our car windscreens. Not anymore. Despite the captivating diversity I mention above, moth abundance has declined dramatically in recent years. Disastrously too, since moths are a key part of the larger eco-system: they pollinate plants, and their caterpillars are a crucial food-source for birds, just as the adults themselves are for bats and for birds like our heathland nightjars. Hence the elaborate camouflages they adopt – as in the featured Peppered Moth blending perfectly with the blotches on my paving.
Moths are also beautiful when you see them close-up. Take a look at the ones on the Shingle Street website under Gallery.
Heretical to say it, but they make the gaudier butterflies look almost vulgar.
Jeremy Mynott August 2022
snout
31 Aug 2022
Last moth trapping of August was a bit meagre after a blustery night with showers, but we did catch a lot of Snouts, an ugly name for another subtly marked moth (and you can see why it is called that from its elongated palps).
Jeremy
golden plover
01 Sep 2022
First golden plover of the autumn on one of the pools. It's scientific name is Pluvialis, which means 'rain bird', so let's hope it's an omen for a much-needed downpour.
I'm signing off for a while now, so please keep the observations coming.
Jeremy
Hummingbird hawk moth
29 Aug 2022
This lovely moth is a regular visitor to the red valerian in our garden.
Catherine
short-eared owl
26 Aug 2022
Flushed a short-eared owl from the foreshore between SS and East Lane at about 1600hrs. First of the autumn, but from where?
Jeremy
linnets
25 Aug 2022
The linnet flock on the grassland past the Beacons is now 100 strong. Joined today by a wheatear passing through and perching occasionally on the memorial bench.
Jeremy
Chinese water deer
23 Aug 2022
We get Chinese water deer around the dykes in SS, usually shy and well-concealed, but I had a great view of one in the open on Orford Ness, galloping across the stone desert.
Jeremy
pied flycatcher
20 Aug 2022
A pied flycatcher in the trees round the allotment patch. Probably a migrant from Scandinavia. Can be hard to spot because they move restlessly in the upper branches, but often call – a high pic-pik followed by some ticking notes (OK, not very helpful, sorry, but once you've learned it you can locate them much more easily).
Jeremy
migrant birds
18 Aug 2022
There's been a fall of migrant birds down the east coast with the change in the weather. Pied flycatchers and whinchats have been seen in SS, so look out for wrynecks too in the next few days
