Kentmere

Autumn mists In the Kentmere woods

 The morning was silent and still and a sense of mystery pervaded the wood.  The light was low and colour drained away with toppled and tangled trees giving a weird look.   A heron squawked and a pair  flew over Kentmere Reservoir, a jay  screeched at them.   Nuthatch and great spotted woodpecker were calling and a tapping resonated in the silence. High notes of gold crest came from high in conifers. Crab apples ripen in the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. The fells are lost in a thick white mist of saturated air that highlights the realm of spider silk.

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Spiders' webs show in the bracken and silken hammocks festoon shrubs and low trees, their dense weave of silk highlighted by mist-droplets.   By the early afternoon the sun will peep through the humid air and the webs will be invisible once more.  But through the morning the mist prevails and reminds us of the dominance of the spider in our world.   Spider silk is transparent and virtually invisible but  mist-droplets jewel their webs into being.   As we walk through the wood webs glint for a moment, then disappear.   Now you see them, now you don't.   

A few sloes appear on a blackthorn where a spider hammock is strung through its branches.  A shrub bare of leaves is adorned with silken hammocks, horizontal sheets of thin and densely woven silk.  They're everywhere, over bushes, bracken and grasses . These sheet webs are  usually the creation of the Linyphiidae.
​Early autumn leaves fall and float through the still air.   A Guelder Rose bush brings colour to the grey-green wood with its crop of red berries and leaves of purple hue.   With Nature you must seize the moment, it may not come again.  This Guelder Rose has a rich crop of berries and some of its leaves assume autumn colour but already it fruit blacken and begin to rot.   Thunderstorms and heavy rain the next night will begin to strip the tree of fruit and leaves.  

There are hazel nuts and tiny green hazel catkins in readiness for the coming spring.   Spider silk trails through autumnal bracken, catching onto the seed-heads of bluebells.  There's a bank of grasses and bracken where spider-silk threads through the vegetation and nothing escapes it.   Long, long trails of silk hint at the spider's industry in creating this dense web of fine threads whose misty pallor is taken-up into the thick air that the sun cannot penetrate.

Hirundines fly low over the pastures by Kentmere Hall where sheep are grazing.   They chatter loudly as they gather on fences and alight on wires above the track.    Are they swallow or house martin? It's hard to tell because there are lots of immature swallows who do not yet have the tail streamers of the adult birds and mist hangs thick over the fells and the light is poor so the birds show black and white.  I can see swallow tail-streamers but watching the birds in flight I believe I'm seeing the house martin profile.  Images confirm both are present.   A house martin in flight shows that distinctive white rump and some birds on the wire have white faces.   A swallow about to alight  on a wire shows that lovely swallow tail patterned with white.   Very soon they'll be gone.
As we return through the woods there's a glimmer of sunlight and the spiders' webs  are no longer visible, but we know their secret traps spread everywhere.

In the mystery wood I told my friend of the tawny owl whose loud calls had woken me one night.  Not tawny owls duetting but a vocal young tawny seeking to establish a territory not far from the mature trees where it was raised   She had heard it too.  And that night the owl was hooting shortly after darkness fell. Impossible to see it in the darkness but it's evocative.   We have a neighbourhood grapevine which tells of tawny owls calling, so we work out their territory.