Autumn already?

I'm getting the idea that the wildliife around these parts have decided it's Autumn. It's only August!

Mainly it's the spiders. I've found two or three male house spiders in the last few days, all in the bathroom. Actually maybe it's the same one... I do chuck them out, but they try to get back in.

You can tell they are (or "it is") male because of the enlarged palps, the mouthparts.

Autumn is the House Spider's mating season and the males start moving out from their hiding places in search of females.

I would love to shrink to spider size and watch the hunts and scavenging that goes on in my house of a night! We have countless wolf spiders in our garden, around our patio. They like to sun themselves. A couple have found their way into the house and made little silk funnels in dark corners.

We had one that lived just outside the shoe cupboard and one that lived under the tumble dryer. I would see them quite regularly waiting for their dinner to step onto their territory.

Late at night I've seen Silverfish racing across the floors and found a Daddy Long Legs Spider carrying a dead one up a wall the other week! It made me think of a scavenging hyena. After all, Daddy Long Leg Spiders are scavengers too.

Can you imagine what it must be like at night, like a Kenyan desert plain, an epic of life and death! I'd love to see it.

Snail Sexy Time

Apologies for the use of the following irritating phrase, but there is no choice;


Oh.   My.   God.


I have just seen a snail's sex organs...


I should set the scene before I launch into a fascinating description.


Sultry August Sunday afternoon, cousin's beautiful Victorian cottage garden, impending summer BBQ, the girls are arguing over a snail...

And so it begins. To appease my rowing children and save a poor lowly snail from becoming an innocent bystander mutilated during a riot, I started to hunt for more snails and spotted two in an old pot behind the shed. They were stuck together and I presumed sheltering in a cool spot away from the heat of the sun... but I was wrong.

I pulled them apart and at first I thought they had parasites growing on them, before I twigged that actually I had just interrupted a passionate mollusc moment.

It was utterly fascinating. Each one had a white growth protruding from the side of its head (some sort of lady bits) and what looked to me to be a piece of fishing wire next to it (a snail penis!). It was one of those scenes that you can't help but keep looking at even though it makes you feel a bit queasy.

They had realised their sexual liaison was over, so I quickly called the girls over and we watched them sucking their own sex organs back inside their bodies and turn once again into a couple of innocent snails.

What can I say? It was a brilliant afternoon. The BBQ wasn't too bad either.