Wasp Spiders & Dartford Warblers, 43 Years in the Making
The 6 hour drive to Arne in Dorset for my 40th Birthday wasn’t entirely about seeing Dartford Warblers and Wasp Spiders, but to say the week long trip wasn’t influenced by those ambitions would certainly be an untruth. Despite a plethora of exciting wildlife walks and adventures, both species eluded my lens and remained on my most wanted list, until this year (3 years later)!
A year after my Arne Adventure I learned that Thursley Common was a location where Dartford Warblers could be found. A forty minute drive from my parents’ house, venturing over during our Summer visits was too tempting to resist. Having grabbed my first glimpse and “record shots” last year, this year the only morning I managed to head over, allowed some better encounters and some half decent photos to boot.
As well as being pretty flighty, these warblers spent a lot, if not most of their time low in the vegetation feeding on insects. On several occasions I was frustrated with the rustling heather almost an armslenght away as a Dartford Warbler would forage tantalisingly out of sight. As I learnt to recognise their call and identify several popular perches above the heather line, I was able to create some better photo ops, though such opportunities were both fleeting and few and far between. Such challenges make for the best photo walks!
The days that followed prevented me venturing out to common again, but I did manage to head out to the much closer Bushy Park on most mornings, where I got increasingly obsessed with a family of common terns (another tale for another day). Our final visit to the park, on our final morning turned a little autumnal. Spiders’ webs that had been invisible in the days prior suddenly glistened in the early morning sun. And in the centre of several more intriguing webs was an eight legged creature I had almost forgotten about about. A wasp spider.
Several of them, scattered along the water’s edge between the spiked, tough, tubular blades of grass stretched those bejewelled webs with their distinctive vertical zigzags at the centre, fascinating, intriguing and a fitting ending, that left me with a sensation close to satisfied yet still wanting more, more time, always.
