Monthly Archives: June 2023

nature, Spiders

Walking on Air and Hazardous Sex!

Drinking my coffee in the sunshine today I disturbed a spider that was sunbathing — she ran across the table then appeared to scamper through thin air, horizontally, a metre or so to the bushes. I looked more closely and there was her escape wire — a single strand of the finest silk only visible as it moved in the breeze and caught the sun.

What an amazing material spider silk is — strength, elasticity, organic, recyclable — I spent the rest of the morning reading about spider’s webs.

Then we went out to look for butterflies but look what we found!

A mysterious web in hawthorn scrub, and guarding it… Look carefully.

A nursery web spider — she makes a secure three-dimensional pen for her babies until they can fend for themselves. If you don’t believe me — see them magnified!

These will soon have used up all the yolk with which they hatched, be able to produce their own silken threads and catch tiny flies and each other — Mum will release them before there is too much cannibalism and they will disperse to complete their own life cycle. In the UK they live about a year, hibernating during the winter. Mating is hazardous for the males who have evolved various ploys to avoid being eaten by their mate like offering gifts of food to distract the female and also playing dead! Survival of the fittest — only the really clever ones mate more than once!

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Aviation History, Family History

How to Fly (for Grandchildren)

I called my grandpa Buckie. When he was born there were no aeroplanes — they hadn’t been invented but 50 years earlier a man called George had had an idea and he built a glider — this is how it looked:

It actually flew and was called George Cayley’s governable parachute. It was very scary so George sent his coachman up in it who afterwards was so shaken up that he stomped off and said he would never work for George ever again!

When Buckie was 4 years old, in 1903, two brothers called Orville and Wilbur in America built the first proper aeroplane — it looked like this:

Wright’s Flyer

The two wings gave it lift, they were shaped so that when it moved forward the air moved faster over the top and with higher pressure underneath the whole thing wanted to lift. It was made to move forward by an engine that drove two propellers in front of the wings. The first day it flew, each of the brothers had a go, Orville flew 37 meters then Wilber flew 260 meters.

By the time Buckie was 12, planes looked like this:

Mercury Monoplane 1911

By the time Buckie was 17 he had joined the Navy, because there wasn’t yet a Royal Air Force, and he would actually fly a Sopwith Camel like this one in the First World War.

F6314: Sopwith Camel

Flying was very dangerous then — Buckie crashed 16 times. He was quick-witted and lucky and lived until he was old but still drove his car very fast.

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Birds, Ecology

Crisis in Paradise!

This is not how a bird box for our precious pied flycatchers should look — it has a perfectly good metal reinforced entrance hole facing the front. This box has been illegally modified — but by whom?

Number one suspect! Greater spotted woodpecker. But amazingly when checked by the intrepid bird ringers, it still contained 5 warm eggs.

The cunning woodpecker will be back to raid this nest once the chicks have hatched — no time to waste!

Last week Bill chastised me for cluttering up the new garage with a sheet of aluminium rescued from the back of a discarded electric fire — it was just what we needed and after an hour of wrestling with a blunt hacksaw and only minor injuries we had a patch. At first light we advanced upon the box, silicon gun in hand, 12 foot ladder under arm. As I wobbled up the ladder a female pied flycatcher whizzed out through the hole in the side of the box. I lobbed my silicone-sticky armour-plating over the hole and withdrew. Mother bird was mystified!

Then ensued the horrible second thoughts that occur when one interferes with Nature — visions of abandoned eggs, of feathers stuck to silicon, of a gormless bird permanently baffled by the loss of her new improved access, etc.

5 days later the ringers returned — she was sitting on chicks — we did not disturb her.

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