Finding little treasures

My trip to Ashdown Forest at the beginning of October with the Sea Cadets for Chosin Cup proved to be a stunning time for Mother Nature.

Not only were the trees looking at their best in terms of colour and the landscape shots proved pretty spectacular too, it was the spiders that caught my attention.

For the first time ever I managed to capture a rainbow in a web. My friend Eleanor spotted this phenomenon in the picture you can see below on the right. I had never heard of this before so it came as a real surprise to see all the colours in the picture.

I was having a mooch around the forest in the military training area when my friend Charlie pointed out this beauty of a web. It was suspended at least 10 foot on either side from the trees. Quite a feat of engineering in my opinion.

We were lucky to pass by it just when the sun was at the right angle to frame it.

On the Saturday morning Charlie and myself were wandering the forest looking for the teams that were out navigating when we came across this blanket of webs.

All the gorse bushes were covered in a mat of webs. Many off them were from the spider mite (Tetranychus lintearius). This little fella is numerous in numbers and seemingly helps in the control of the spread of gorse.

In amongst all the spider mite webs the real spiders also were busy producing beautiful but deadly little traps.

My final shot of the weekend was this one of the bottom half of a web. I was struck by how regular everything was however it was the similarities that the strands seemed to have with a pearl necklace that really caught my attention.

I went out to find the cadets on their travels never thinking for one second that I would find all these little treasures.

Cheers

George