This narrow road, leading to the confluence of the rivers Tees and Greta at the Meeting of the Waters, passes five feet below a pasture and is bounded by its retaining wall. The wall-top wildflowers, protected by a fence from grazing sheep, are at eye level: a convenient place to pause and explore the grassland flora at close quarters.
Today, yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is in full bloom. The white umbels of miniature, daisy-like flowers offer easy opportunities for pollen-eating insects and are attracting a clientele of greenbottles, drone flies and marmalade hoverflies. All are dicing with death as they try to land.
The prevailing south-westerly wind must have toppled the tallest flowering stems as they grew, so about 30 now hang over the wall. Their flowerheads, defying gravity, have compensated by curling upwards to present their florets to pollinators. And in that curl, alongside every inflorescence, a money spider, hidden at the edge of the flowers, has woven its hammock-shaped web.
As I watch, a breeze buffets the contorted blooms. They, and those silken hammocks, rise and fall rhythmically, like the deck of an aircraft carrier in an ocean swell. A marmalade hoverfly approaches, darts away, returns and holds station, hovering, synchronised with the motion of its feeding platform, biding its time for a moment of stillness and a safe landing. A drone fly, equally agile in vertical and horizontal flight, makes a successful visit. But then a blundering greenbottle, caught out by a sudden gust of wind, misses the flowers and becomes entangled in the web. With frantic buzzing it barely manages to struggle free. Legs and wings of smaller, less fortunate flies litter the sticky threads.
There are other spider species that hunt among flowers, using their attraction to pollinators as bait to lure insect prey within reach, but this opportunist population of money spiders, which usually sling their hammocks in grass or in a hedge, have taken advantage of an accident of wind and distorted floral geometry that has provided scaffolding for their traps. They seem to be very successful; a silken egg cocoon, woven into the tatters of an old web by its fully fed owner, is evidence of a fruitful strategy.
