This year I have spent many hours above the old quarry staring at a brick wall. Casual observers may wonder at my lengthy inspections of blankness, turning my back on the panoramic view, ignoring the woods to the side, failing to scan the skies for late hobbies or drifting buzzards. The object of this obsession is not even a building of architectural vintage, but a two-storey 1990s construction of reconstituted stone bricks and concrete sills.
Nobody realises that I am exploring a vertical universe. An ant dawdles over the rock face and a feather-antennaed male mosquito clings fast on four legs, its middle pair thrown over either side of its head like bicycle handlebars. Drilled holes are filled with the tatty silk curtains of last summer's spiders' lairs. The sheltered doorways are where moths turn our day into their night. I often find them here, splayed wings pressed against the wall, cryptic in name and colours, but today there is only a cranefly sitting on the ceiling.
Autumn has brought out the most striking adherents to the building. There is one against the smooth concrete of a window ledge. First impressions are of a splat of paint, with jagged spears bursting out of a central blob. Up close, the eight radiating spokes look like dead conifer needles. This is a harvestman, a flattened creature that does not have the crooked-legged stance of its more familiar cousin. The first time I found one, I thought it was dead and tapped a foot for confirmation. It instantly drew its legs up and lumbered off with a comedy spider gait.
It seems this bizarre animal has not been in Britain long enough to be given an accepted English name. First discovered in Morocco, Dicranopalpus ramosus began shambling northwards through Europe just after the second world war and landed on the south coast in 1957. By the millennium it had reached Scotland. It owes its scientific name to a tiny detail ? the two-pronged palps above its head. I can't help feeling this beast deserves a name that befits its striking appearance.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/21/country-diary-sandy-morocco-spider
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