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Aside from the odd globe of golden yellow thrown out by flowering marsh marigolds, Ducan's Marsh is dominated by the copper colour of the dead rushes. It still seems a rather dormant landscape, but as I walk through the vegetation I realise that it is the scene of a life-and-death drama. Evidence of this quiet killing is brought to me intermittently when my coat becomes plastered with a rather unpleasant skein of old silk and the husk-like carcasses of dead St Mark's flies.
The source of the carnage is called Larinioides cornutus, the furrow orbweb spider. I slowly realise that they are stationed right across this marsh in almost every spike of last year's marsh thistle and black knapweed. These hollow stems stand high above the general canopy of the rushes and catch the breeze with its cargo of innocent flies. In each of the locations the arachnid architecture is much the same: a female spider winches together two or more stems of the hollow stalks and then wraps around the point where they touch a protected couch of white silk. From this private retreat emanates the web itself. Look closer still and there she is – a glorious creature with two waving lines of chocolate converging at the rear of her mushroom-coloured abdomen.
Conventionally we think of spiders as rather niggardly predators. True to form, I touch my pen nib into the mouth of her silky bed and she immediately advances, all waving legs and open jaws. Yet this particular group of spiders is characterised by a massive rounded abdomen that looks disproportionate to the rest of the animal. As well as being beautifully patterned, furrow orbweb spiders have a wonderfully gravid, even feminine shape. While each one of them might preside over a charnel house of black flies spinning gently in the breeze, we should recall that every dawn she gifts to us the sight of those dew-crusted webs glittering in the low-angled sunlight.
