This month countryside writer MIKE BAGSHAW gets melancholy with the arrival of autumn

I HAVE to admit to a touch of melancholy when autumn begins to creep up on us and steal away those glorious days of summer. There are consolations though - fungi sprouting through the woodland floor, trees full of fruit and dazzling displays of cobwebs in the hedgerows.

It’s not that our local spiders have suddenly multiplied or become super-busy – the webs have been there all summer but we just haven’t seen them. Being made of super-fine silk they are all but invisible to the human eye unless caught by low sunlight.

On cool and moist autumn mornings, though, a veritable blanket of webs covering the vegetation suddenly becomes apparent because of the condensation of millions of droplets of dew onto the strands.

One astonishing phenomenon that I have been fortunate enough to witness on a handful of occasions (most memorably early one October morning in a meadow near Newton-on-Rawcliffe) is a dewbow. If the sunlight is at just the right angle and the moisture level sufficient, refraction of the light occurs in the same way as in a traditional rainbow.

The Victorian diarist Francis Kilvert described his experience of it in 1875 as, “....the gossamer webs gleaming and twinkling into crimson and gold and green, like the most exquisite shot-silk dress in the finest texture of gauzy silver wire. The Virgin’s threads glowed with changing opal lights and glanced with all the colours of the rainbow”.

Our mediaeval forebears did not realise that money spiders were the producers of these threads, hence the origin of the two old names that Kilvert used. The religious explanation was that they were fragments of threads from the Madonna’s gown with the slightly more rational theory being that fine feathers from September goose fairs had drifted through the air to land in the grass – goose-summer … gossamer.

Occurrences like these remind us just how many arachnids there are out there in the North Yorkshire countryside. Spiders are abundant and very influential creatures and they owe their success, in the main, to their web-making abilities. Actually, that’s not strictly true, because not all spiders make webs but they can all produce silk.

Some other invertebrate animals, like bees, ants, crickets and of course silkworms, can produce a rudimentary form of silk but it’s spiders that have made an art form of it.

The common garden spider Araneus diadematus, for instance, has five separate glands, each producing a different sort of silk. Drag-line silk that supports the web is incredibly strong, capture-line silk is stretchy and sticky, egg-sac silk is tough and stiff, fly-wrapping silk is the toughest of the lot and glue-silk is the stuff that attaches all the others together.

We talk about a spider spinning its silk but, unlike human textile production, no twisting of fibres is involved.

Spider silk is a protein that exists as a liquid inside the animal but it solidifies in contact with air. To produce long strands the spider doesn’t squeeze it out like toothpaste but attaches a blob to some object and then moves its body away by walking or abseiling, thus pulling the silk out of its spinnerets – clever.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, believe it or not, many spiders make a new fly-catching web every day. Last thing at night they dismantle it and eat the silk, it is valuable protein after all, and during the hours of darkness re-build the whole thing.

This might seem an unnecessary chore but they do it with remarkable ease and speed. A three-drag-line frame is followed by a central “Y”, spokes of a wheel and finally a spiral sticky net. Voila, a natural masterpiece.