Walthamstow spiders and wasps

I’d been meaning for a while to get out and photograph some of the amazing spider webs I’ve been noticing more and more as this autumn’s progressed… So of course, when I seized the opportunity, seeing a wonderful sunset taking shape this evening, I opened the door in excitement only to be faced with a massive web spanning most of our little doorway arch. With its web anchored to the floor and the arch, its creator sits dead centre at chest level.

That’s from crouched down in on our doorstep. Of course it’s wonderfully easy to see it as a mammoth arachnid leaping across the skies of east London…

I ventured across Blackhorse Road, snapping away, and found some absolute beauties spanning the hedge and fencing at the primary school along Edward Road. Strangely, the start of the Walthamstow marshes along Coppermill Lane—whose bushes and fences were havens for web-building all through the summer—seems to now be spidered out, the barbed wire along the tops of the reservoir fences smothered in straggly lengths of silk, congested with small dead flies… and hardly a spider in sight. The scene is what probably passes for apocalyptic in the spiders’ world.

So, may I present some cheerier times from Walthamstow’s spider community, in honour of the species’ frankly astonishing persistence, temerity and skill in constructing their insect traps…

Talking of dead insects, I also came across this macabre, almost mandalic pairing of dead wasps along Edward Road. Did they really sting each other in the tail? Some bizarre, dangerous new sexual fetish sweeping the wasp world, leaving those who went "a bit too far" scattered on our pavements?