Spiders in Acton are a sign of seasonal change. I've not experienced anything like it, nor lived anywhere like it since the age of seven, when I was ripped from the suburban housing estate comforts of Hertfordshire, and rerooted to an ugly working village in the middle of Suffolk. In that village there was space, and the privacy that comes with four walls separated from the neighbouring houses. I discovered birds. Cocksure Pheasants strutting through the garden, the raucous Rookery over the road and Fieldfares raiding the apple trees in the garden of my neighbour too elderly to pick them. The first Chiffchaffs of the year became important to me. It signified spring. Autumn by the sky filling with birds again after the summer lull. Juveniles of many species locating due south and sailing over. 

Last summer I moved to London. To a job in deepest west London, where the grey and beige seep from the sky and the concrete and color everything. I lost my horizon to the perimeter of the street. My sky was no longer so full of birds. In its place I found spiders. I found spiders straddled across my front gate in the murky half light of the morning, only I didn't find them until I found them on my face, silk breaking around me and feelings of both disgust and guilt. Sorry little guy. We repeated it for two months, gradually decreasing in frequency until around November and the arrival of winter in the city. 

Winter isn't a season worth celebrating in London: it is damp, mild and filthy, and its citizens match the gloominess of their surroundings. It is mild enough so that the Chiffchaffs and Blackcaps don't have to leave, and this doesn't give spring a headstart but spoils it's grand arrival with the longer, brighter days. If the leaves never quite all fall from the trees than what is winter? Where does that leave spring?

So instead I celebrate autumn, and away from the countryside and coast that I grew up on, in and with, I've turned to spiders. I watch them on grey Saturdays as I wash away the past week with endless coffee. I learn their names. It seems the polite place to begin. The Garden Cross spider. With a name it can go beyond mere surface appearance. A surface that is stripy brown legs, alternating light and dark, with a crucifix of broken white stamped onto its abdomen. And I watch one weaving its web from the inside out, against the pale sky where the web can’t be seen, leaving her to space-walk slowly and purposefully, suspended by her own invisible lines. When woven the web is both intricate and massive, the size of the window looking out onto the garden. It collects a hoverfly and a small wasp, both quickly wrapped up in excess webbing and slowly deflated. A life transfusion. In it she finds the protein that gets metabolised into the white crucifix mark on her back.

Meanwhile in the spiders I find a life that makes me feel better about being in the city. Amidst the rush that threats to drain the life out of me, I can still find new ways to mark the seasons, and keep in touch with the nature around me that’s different to what I’m used to in the country.

And then October. The spiders begin to fade away and the sky is pierced with the soft edged calls of Redwings and the clatter of Fieldfares amongst the traffic noise, jet engine roar, parakeet shriek and sirens, alarms and the hectic hurry. I miss the spiders just sitting there.

Funny how your ideas of nature can seem so solid and yet change so quickly.

Scene one.

Last week I was in Madeira, up a dry riverbed and halfway towards the summit of an old volcano. The steep sided rock faces were covered in laurel forests, thick and lush. They seemed primordial, untouched; the habitat of the Trocaz Pigeon said the book. We saw two. Distant flyovers, weaving along the fringe of trees at the edge of the cliff top. Later we tried another valley. Just next to the go kart track, down the valley from the gravel quarry. The bottom and top were orchards mostly, scattered with houses. Lorries thundered past, temporarily turning the world to dust. And when it settled: Trocaz Pigeons, perched not too distantly in the trees. The colour of stone, but shaped more athletically than you might think possible for a pigeon. When they flew up the valley they were darker: Jackdaw-like actually, with large pigeon tails and thick white and black bands.

Further down the valley by the main road, the river has been diverted by concrete to take it under the go kart track. Pallid and Plain Swifts fed in a frenzy on the insects just above the water. It’s cooler here by the bridge. And you need the dark background to work out the shade of black-brown on the swifts. All the while the smell of burning petrol, the whine of two-stroke engines and the screech of tires and the site of swifts careering chaotically.


Scene two.

I got a text just as I was leaving work. A Wryneck at Wormwood Scrubs, the second ever record for the park. It hastened my step.

I had given up on birding the park for the summer and never quite gotten back into the swing now it’s ornithologically autumn. It can be the most dispiriting place. I am still young enough to struggle with a 6:30am start for diminishing returns of Meadow Pipits and Whitethroats, and the staring mutual incomprehension of joggers and model aircraft flyers. But a Wryneck. They’re not supposed to turn up at west London parks with views of brutalist council estates, the Shard, the Heathrow flight path and the London eye… 

I got there for the last hour of light. As the sunset burnt up over distant building; I watched the open grass, searched amongst the brambles. I found teenagers smoking in the bushes, people drinking beer by the benches, artists sketching the umbellifers in the long grass and football practice. Multiple aircraft flyers and joggers tracing rings around the park; British Airways and parakeets shrieking through the sky, and a multitude of friendly dogs. No migrant birds. No Wrynecks taking a quick break between Sweden and Africa in this islet of green grass, or any of the as-advertised Whinchats either.

Nevermind. It’s the promise that nature can surprise us still — can turn up where least expected and in the least promising of places —  that sustains.

Encounters

Elegant was the first word that came to mind. An elegant cycle of gulls, carving irresistibly
through the current of air up above the tower block roofs. There must have been over a hundred of them, black hairlines against a lumpy mass of grey cloud. I could see the birds stretching their necks out, apparently taking gulps of fresh air.

Flying ant day. Crawling in the cracks by the kerb a couple of winged ants remain earthbound; by this evening most were airborne. The gulls were a feeding frenzy, though frenzy is the wrong word entirely for an action where grace seems to replace effort. Starlings scythe over the street, momentarily filling the sky in their pursuit of the ants.

Thunder starts to rumble. The sky began to empty.

I remember flying ant day from my childhood. I remember cars cooking in the sun and the pavement beating heat back; and both carpeted in flying ants. An annual day of plague in the suburbs. You don’t seem to get those numbers anymore. It's almost cliche this nostalgia for the animals of childhood that are missing now.

***

His eyes were inscrutably dark, and nestled under a furrowed brow of his own intentions. He never turned his restless gaze from me, yet muttered quietly to himself. He was smaller than the female -- about a third smaller -- and resting on the borrowed glove over my hand. Simultaneously heavier than I'd been led to believe but lighter, much lighter, than you'd guess. I decided I liked him.

I have always preferred the company of animals to people. Sandy (he) was a Long-legged Buzzard, an elegant bird of arid places, and the rich colour of a desert sunset. With his dead weight in my held out arm, I found myself entranced by the agile power hidden behind those eyes, and those quick movements as it kept its head stable under my trembling arm. It stretched its wings, lightly brushing my face with its outermost flight feathers, as if with disdain. Human, know your place.

I was just another passing face at the falconry place, another awkward shuffling land creature like its master, but without the supply of raw chicken and rabbit. And yet…

***

From the crest of a rolling wave of Chiltern chalk you see southern England spread out before you in its summer browns. In the haze of this hot day it seems to stretch out endlessly, but I know this is nonsense. I mentally clone out the M40. Underfoot: scabious and vetch, a Pyramidal Orchid and a hundred other flowers I don't know. Beyond: a cloud of Chalkhill Blues and a Dark Green Fritillary, Small Skippers everywhere and a few Marbled Whites still. A place such as this writes it's own poetry.

Red Kites spiral above -- and beyond -- until passing out as specks in the haze. I found a Silver-spotted Skipper by the path, it's wings shut tight and proboscis rooting around the blue sun of a scabious flower. A new species for me, with large flecks of silver in its greeny orange underwings, distinguishing it from the other orange skippers, that aren't so closely tied to this habitat. It flits off, scudding low over the flowers, chases off a burnet moth and goes in search of other quarrels. A fun butterfly.

In Remote Part

Blair Atholl is a quietly overlooked corner of the Cairngorm national park, despite being tucked beside the A9 less than an hour north of Perth. The station is served by two trains an afternoon, doesn't sell tickets and has a pair of House Sparrows breeding in an old House Martin nest. It's quiet outside of the castle walls — the only tourist trap in the village.

I took the track north up the river Tilt, to Glen Tilt. A Red Squirrel hurries away from me up a dead branch leaning against a pine, curls it's tail up behind it and waits for the danger to pass. I carried on quickly up the path, joining a gravel track that services the few crofts down the glen. There is nobody around but the landscape holds the fingerprints of humans. From an opening I saw a cow stood upon a hummock in a field full of the scars of old ridge and furrow farming. Rifle shots crackle around the valley from the nearby firing range. From a grand stone bridge you get a clear view of either bank of the river Tilt: thickly forested with spruces, weedy birches and small clumps of larch trees. 

The larches are important to Blair Atholl, which beyond its diminutive size has had a disproportionate effect on the look of the highlands. A non-native tree, larches have been planted on Scottish estates since the 17th century, but never with such fervour as by John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl. To a maxim of 'for Beauty, effect and Profit’ he carpeted his corner of highland Perthshire with 21 million trees by 1830 — 14 million of which were larches — chosen to grow straight and strong for the construction of naval ships. It was the most extensive plantation of its time and its hard not to see the effect of it across Britain. Think of the uplands and its hard to not to picture an autumnal larch waning gold somewhere in the scene.

I am alone, yet it is a solitude achieved whilst being surrounded by a nature as much human as it is self-willed. A sort of industrial nature with a purpose and a price tag beyond its mere existence. 

A Wood Warbler sung. A Roe deer with velvety antlers trotted through as more rifle shot cackled through the glen. Forestry moves on. ‘Planter’ John Murray passed away; the navy made their ships out of iron instead of larch; hunting became more profitable than blanket trees. The forestry here is a fragment of what there once was, and mostly spruce now.

The path exits the forest, a sign post promising me a shortcut to Glen Tilt. It takes me over a lightly grazed sheep field covered in Common Spotted Orchids and the orange peel of Small Heath butterflies. Past the sprawling croft, Wheatears nesting in a stone wall and Swallows still singing. It takes me through a cloud of flies that will buzz around my ears for the next ten minutes until the track returns me to the river, lined with lush deciduous trees and a slight breeze. Ahead of me the valley kinks towards Carn a'Chamain then on the map kinks back and properly becomes the Glen Tilt of famous natural beauty. 

 

I never get there. 

The sun broke out from behind cloud and the buttercup lined track came alive with butterflies. Many Small Heaths, by far the commonest on these grassy mountain slopes, but whites also, and a Northern Brown Argus. My first encounter with this Scottish specialty, freshly emerged from its pupae and shining copper and verdigris, with a single white fleck in the middle of its forewing.

Navigating the remoter parts of Scotland by public transport is a fraught exercise, bedevilled by trains that stop irregularly and three to four hour waits for the next one. I gave myself two hours to get here, two and a half hours to get back and I had run out of time with the Glen just out of reach, distracted by orchids, butterflies and trees. 

I don’t mind.

***

The next day I walked up Ben Cleuch, highest of the Ochil mountains. A short walk that climbs up 721 metres from the bus stop at sea level over the length of a couple of miles. It is knee knackering, despite the spring of peat and bed of grass. Ben Cleuch sits half behind, half on top of Andrew Gannel hill and does the trick of disappearing from view until you crest what you think is the peak and see several hundred metres more of ascent over the sheep smooth grassy sides. And when you reach the top -- the view of Dale-like Ochils gently falling away to the north, to wind farms, reservoirs and the Grampians beckoning on the horizon. To the south: the steep flanks of the mountains either side shield the central belt from view. You see Tillicoultry and Alloa, the bending Forth a ribbon of reflected white sky and Scotland's bread basket stretching into the southern haze.

I feel it in my knees, my calves and my thighs. After a week of walking it's time to give into the exhaustion and have an ice cream.

The way up is clouded by (relative) summit fever; the way down reveals the industry that was once here, whose death led to the mill villages at the foot of these hills decaying. The woods at the bottom are laced with rusting pipes that used to funnel water into the mills, the jagged peaks of an abandoned quartz-dolerite quarry look like a mock Cuillin mountain, the steps cut into the rock of the path and the old iron hand railing far too grand and permanent to be for the stream of middle aged hikers converging on the highest point around. Bracken and foxglove coat the lower slopes, the woods are a mash of natives and exotic trees, and stink of recreational drug use. The path spits you out at the top of the village, beside the well shepherded concrete sided burn that runs past an old mill, now housing. A Grey Wagtail flits up river as I poke my head over the fence. It uses the concrete steps that are now the river bed to forage for insects in a blur of yellow on grey.

It's the same story in all the villages on the south side of the Ochils. They make great walks, up the rivers and into the hills but shackled by the melancholy of the post-industrial and what once was but is now no more.

I was, as they say, walking it off. London life is a bombardment of stimuli which — after they exhaust you — keep on coming until you are eroded to the bones of anxiety and inferiority. The only cure I've found is walking. Lewes to Brighton looked long enough.
***

 
The first thing I do on leaving Lewes station is get lost. The south coast messes with my internal bearings. North becomes south. East is no longer where it should be and I tell Anna her compass is lying and plough off in the wrong direction. Twice. We find the correct lane to Brighton, miss the correct turning off and pass through a mazy series of farm tracks through the levels of the river Ouse instead. The soil is dark and damp, the path strewn with yellow snails with a variety of dark swirls on the shell. We gingerly picked our way through as a mark of respect to the creatures that belong here, who aren't lost and passing through on a moment of map reading incompetence. We emerged through a tunnel of trees into the next village along from where we should be. No problem -- we'll just take the path through the fields of mud and take the next track into the downs. This is a way marked path, well trodden and over a beautifully worn old stile, yet it runs through the middle of a sown field. We both think it feels a little wrong to walk these paths.

Rain on chalk hisses like an insect stridulating on a summer's evening. It catches me out, has me staring at the long grass confused until it makes sense. There are no insects here today: not the spectacular Adonis Blue butterfly nor humdrum flies too small and fleeting to identify. There is just the persistency of rain sweeping in over the downs, as it had the whole morning and would for the rest of the day. Skylarks hover above the crops, defying gravity in a fat brown flutter of wings, whilst singing the most quintessentially English of bird songs; in the most English of summer weather.

What I found on the downs was a Corn Bunting. Beside a ploughed up and planted down — wheat and rapeseed where it should be wildflower rich grassland — one sung from the top of a manure pile. The sound and smell of the old countryside. Through the rain I find it with my binoculars. Unashamedly fat, brown and streaky, the Corn Bunting is the most unspectacular of special birds. A bird that fitted so well into the old systems of agriculture that it took its name from them. A bird of messy inefficiency, it was swatted aside by intensification, the destruction of hedgerows and the ploughing of margins that now... The 90% declines since 1970 tell a grim story; that I can't remember the last one I saw before this tells another. It seems doomed to become a feathered folk memory: the barley bird, so local that populations 30km apart could sing with different dialects. Too local to survive the 21st century.

What I also found on the downs was space. A horizon not hemmed in by buildings and a landscape where the name makes sense. It lacks the magnificent up of mountains: instead on the summit the horizon appears flat, the space inbetween drifting down like the hollow between waves. I find a landscape both of comforting old Englishness but also bleakness in this weather. As well as birds I watch the rain rolling over and falling on crumbling farmsteads and rusting machinery.

 

The walk took us over the final crest and dropped us back on to roads until we hit the chalk cliffs of the English Channel. A shingle beach and the milky grey of the English seaside. From here it was a long slog to Brighton, past millionaire yachts and Asda; marina apartments and concrete flyovers; promenades and graffiti covered fences. And flowers growing from every crevice. 

The next day I feel fantastic.

A type of paranoia infects me when I’m looking for Adders. Each step becomes overthought for fear of landing on top of England’s only venomous snake, hidden in ankle deep heather and half-awake in the cold easter sun. It would be just my luck. With each step the heather trembles, its dried kinked roots snap and shake. It’s a little like learning to walk again with due care and distrust, a head bowed thoroughly inspecting the ground and short shuffling steps.

It is also utterly stupid. The chance of finding an Adder seems remote, the chance of two fangs injecting me with a mild venom and becoming one of 100 people a year who seek medical attention — or one of 50 people a year to whom this happens who didn’t try to pick up the Adder first — seems remoter still. Or being the first person to die of one since 1975, or the fifteenth since 1876… You can balance the odds against the 'fatal haemothorax [and] massive haematemesis’* of the bite itself. But to experience that (and no fun thing is ever prefixed with ‘haem’) you first need to find your snake.

West of the reedbeds and woods lies the Suffolk Sandlings. Purple-brown heather, Scots Pines and exploded yellow gorse bushes stretch around for miles; part of a chain of sandy heaths running parallel to Suffolk's shingle shoreline. Or from a snake's perspective, a thick band of warm, dry and undisturbed habitat.

We take a path at random. The 'we' this time included another Stephen. I joke that he is a modern day St Patrick, with a tripod for a staff, Agnosticism for Catholicism and Oakley sunglasses; for he’s never seen an English snake (it is not my best joke). The closest he’d come was the day before, when we found a shed Adder skin on a heath in the west of Suffolk. The weather then was predominantly overcast, with a biting northerly wind. The skin was tucked in long grass like a piece of litter, stiff, clear and plasticy. A ragged, torn approximation of the Adder’s shape, wider at the head end than at the tail, and indented with the pattern of scales. A tactile ghost. The living animals remained a more traditional ghost, making their presence felt but never seen.

The wind swung easterly overnight; the clouds dissolving by late morning to a deep summer sky. Taste the air on your tongue. Coconut, pollen and salt on the breeze. It tasted good. It felt good weather for basking on a bank in the lee of the breeze. New returned Nightingales sang, tuning up their extraordinary vocal chords. A Dartford Warbler flicked across the heath, scrawny and barely visible amongst the fronds of heather. A Kestrel hovered, seeking out the same small rodents as the snakes. Green Tiger Beetles and Common Lizards scurried across the track and under the bracken, heather, brambles. My attention becomes diverted to the bumblebees and the miniscule moths buzzing around our feet, and the primitive looking black and scarlet wasps probing the sandy soil.

Ghosts: apparitions, to be sensed and not seen. Figures of fear, a fear that seems absurd in the light of day. A light too cold to reveal anything but their absence. We never found our Adder amongst the diversity of life on that heathland floor. The paranoid hesitancy now feels like wasted energy. Like being afraid of ghosts: why be scared of being bitten by a thing you can't find?

The English countryside is at times cripplingly, stultifyingly safe. No matter how vanishingly unlikely a bite is, Adders are a remnant of a more dangerous fauna, a more exciting fauna. A teasing folk memory that lurks out of sight but never quite out of mind. They require a respect, and remind us that man is not always the alpha animal. If we had more snakes it’s possible I’d be a herpetologist: the love of creatures intermingled with fear is a heady compound indeed. It helps you feel alive.

‘And so I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness’

D H Lawrence

* www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1289323/

The Lesser Spotted

Rosy dawn.

5:45.

Half remembered motions of getting up and dressed and heading to the tube and running for the doors and jumping on and realising it was the wrong train. Fifteen minute delay. The sun is up and burning through the haze when I eventually arrive. I shovel dry cereal from the packet into my mouth as I walk through suburban streets, hoping no one would see me.

Chiffchaffs sing and the dew in the grass sparkles. Old oaks emerge from the dissipating haze, raking at the jet contrails that scar the sky even at this time. The birdsong grew stronger: Blackbirds and Robins mostly, and other common species shading in. The sharp kicking call of a Great Spotted Woodpecker raised excitement, the sharp shriek of a parakeet took me by surprise. I'd forgotten I was in London. I was searching for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers, a species that is quickly and worryingly disappearing throughout England but which remains in some of London’s wooded edges. It remains a secret though: I was told about this wood on the condition that I would tell no one else.

Magpies loitered like bored teenagers. Cackling and chasing each other, as if waiting for something, anything to happen. I loitered with them for two hours in that small wood between houses, quietly seeking out calling birds, unwilling to admit defeat until the sun rose above the canopy and the paths filled with dog walkers and the city roared into another sunny Saturday.

I may not have found what I was looking for in the wood, but I found something else. I found solitude in the city.

The single most exhausting thing about London is the lack of solitude. I can handle the hours I work and the hours I socialise but for a person predisposed to be out of the house; to be alone in some quiet place is the missing link. This is not a city built for introverts, for people like me who find chaos sapping and calm restorative. To be in the woods with the rising sun and surrounded by birds, not people, is the greatest simple pleasure I know.