At present it’s almost impossible to walk the rides around my patch and not snap spiders’ silk. It is everywhere. I notice, as I drive over, that there are even webs on both wing mirrors but, with the sun at the right angle, you can see that there is barely a twig or leaf not bound with gossamer to its neighbours.
Apparently those threads are, gram for gram, five times stronger than steel. Yet what strikes me most is not the strength but the elasticity of spider’s web. A female garden cross spider had just snared a honeybee (an unusual prey at Blackwater, although wasps are commonplace) and while the victim whirred its wings or pulsed its abdomen to break free, the web yawed but held true.
It is remarkable to watch spiders at work in these encounters: the extreme caution, the delicate octave of their movements and then the certainty with which they manipulate their insect prey and inexorably mummify it with silk.
I know this scenario reverses the usual moral order humans plonk on top of nature but spiders need love too, and garden cross spiders must be among September’s most beautiful stars. They are so gloriously varied, from a chaste grey studded with the usual white cruciform right through to oiled mahogany inlaid with cream.
One indisputable merit to this brief arachnid empire is the way that all those shining threads turn even our worst works - and I’m thinking of the many lifeless gardens of wall-like leylandii and lawns shorn to look like pool tables - into multiple sheets of dewed silver. The desert is made momentarily fertile. One estimate of abundance, a million spiders an acre in some habitats, implies billions of miles of this crystallised protein. Recall that since flies are the main arachnid prey, this whole show of silk and sunshine is powered by an often reviled group of insects. But spiders are the key agents and they have now clothed our entire landscape in a silk garment: all Britain, perhaps, as one single glittering weave.
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