This August we had been watching a wasp spider at work in the meadows, efficiently catching and despatching her prey. Then, one day, she disappeared from her web. In our somewhat limited experience it is not until early September that these spiders leave their webs for the last time and construct an egg cocoon nearby before dying. But perhaps our spider had been eaten by a bird? They do mimic wasps as protection, but they are big spiders with a body length of up to 20mm and would make a very nutritious snack for a bird.

We managed to find another wasp spider nearby to watch instead for a while, until she too disappeared. This set us off hunting systematically through the grasses to see if we could find a third one to observe. We had only ever seen a maximum of four wasp spiders in previous years but we hoped we might be lucky. Well, it turned out that we were indeed in luck because we found a further 147!

I am not sure if it is a particularly good year for these spiders or if we just hadn’t looked well enough before. One thing is for sure, we now have our eyes in for where to find them – they need a bit of air space, such as around a woody plant or in a natural cup in the grass as here:

Wasp spiders, Argiope bruennichi, originated in Mediterranean regions but have gradually spread across Europe and were first discovered in the UK around Rye in Sussex in 1922. Since then they have advanced over the south of England and are also edging northwards.

The webs are placed low to the ground in tall grasses, all the better to catch invertebrates such as grasshoppers and flies. Sometimes the spider does such brisk business that she has more than one prey item in her web at a time. In this eventuality, she will wrap them up to immobilise them and then hang them at the edges of her web until she has time to deal with them:

She wraps prey extremely fast because multiple strands of silk come out of her spinneret at the same time:

We will start to cut the meadows next month and our normal practice would be to leave the grasses around a wasp spider web to protect her egg cocoon. But this year we are going to have to have a rethink because there are wasp spider webs over much of the meadows and we can’t leave it all uncut.

Our son and daughter-in-law visited last weekend along with two of their friends who are entomologists. One of them is particularly fond of beetles and found this large weevil under a tile:

But unusually there was also a weevil in the moth trap this week. It is a peculiar looking thing with its antennae emerging halfway down its long snout, or rostrum. It is either an acorn weevil (Curculio glandium) or a nut weevil (Curculio nucum). To tell the difference I’d have needed to get a better look at the end of its antennae:

I am continuing to get good-sized catches of moths in the trap. This beautiful moth is the blood-vein and is one of my favourites:

But it was the Portland ribbon wave below the was the moth highlight of the week. Although this species breeds in Dorset, it is a rare immigrant elsewhere in the country. There were only four records of this moth in Kent last year, yet I had four of them in my trap this week:

There is always a lot of wild carrot, Daucus carota, growing in the meadows and the flowers are much loved by insects:

Once the flowers go over, spiky seeds start to form and the heads close up into a ball:

They form protective purses, offering sanctuary for all sorts of interesting things

There is so much wild carrot in the meadows that these seed heads become quite a feature of the ecosystem at this time of year:

Our visitors started gently prising some of these seed heads open to see what could be found within. The caterpillars of the carrot seed moth, Sitochroa palealis, develop in these protected areas. On the left below is a young caterpillar, and an older and darker one on the right:

I have noticed this adult carrot seed moth around the meadows this summer:

Last year I found a different caterpillar in the seed head although I don’t know what it is:

Our daughter-in-law also found us a new species of ladybird for the meadows in one of the seed heads

There are always lots of small spiders to be found in there too, such as this tiny Xysticus crab spider:

Once the wild carrot seeds fully ripen, flocks of goldfinch will arrive in the meadows to start feasting on them and I am looking forward to that:

Both Johns were back bird-ringing in the meadows on Bank Holiday Monday, although very few birds were around. They hypothesize that the clear skies and gentle winds meant that the migrant birds had taken advantage of the lovely conditions and flown straight over the Channel to France. They did ring this young blackcap though:

As they waited in vain for some birds to turn up, they took a photo of a pair of mating migrant hawker dragonflies on the net pole:

A way to tell that these are migrant hawkers is that glass of white wine just behind the wings and in the middle of the photo below:

One of the trees in the orchard has two stems of different pear varieties grafted onto a single trunk. The Doyenné du Comice pears ripen first, and earlier in August this half of the tree was heavy with gorgeous-looking fruit:

We were looking forward to harvesting them until Dave noticed that they had in fact all disappeared. One lonely Doyenné du Comice remained on the tree:

Where had they all gone? We suspect we know the answer to this because we have these extraordinary photos of this tree from a few years ago:

I was sorry to have lost the fruit, but I was much more upset to have missed the opportunity of getting further photos like this of our arboreal foxes.

However, there are still plenty of conference pears left on the other half of the tree, although these are rock hard at the moment. I have diverted three trail cameras across to keep the tree under close observation because, once they start to ripen, the foxes will no doubt be after these too:

So sadly there were no lovely ripe pears remaining, but our visitors picked some of the apples and processed a mixture of eating and cooking apples to produce some deliciously intense apple juice:

I always like to think of our hedgerow fruit being there to help the birds through the hungry times ahead. But there is so much this year that they also collected some sloes, rose hips and blackberries to take home with them:

They accompanied us on the August tour round the dormouse boxes in the wood last weekend too when I hoped to be able to show them a dormouse. We found seven of these lovely animals in total:

The highlight was finding a family in box 28. The eyes of this little one were only half open so it was around 18 days old:

The schools are back next week and the season is fast drawing to a close. It has been a long and memorable summer but now we’re happily looking forward to the joys of autumn. Soon the meadows will be having their annual cut, the bird ringers will be here catching exciting birds and the woodcock will be making their way back to the wood for winter.