A geometrid moth caterpillar undulates through the grass. Grip with front legs. Cast off astern. Loop the body, drawing in the tail, and grip. Let go for’ard. Stretch to measure its length, with geometric precision, along the leaf. Grip again for’ard. And repeat. I tap the grass and the caterpillar freezes, relying on its resemblance to a dead twig to keep it safe.
Dappled shade cast by a hawthorn makes this a perfect spot to sit and rest on a sultry summer afternoon. Nothing fancy for a picnic, just a cheese and chutney roll, a pear and a carton of orange juice, but the company is endlessly fascinating. The calcareous grassland of this ancient wood pasture, unploughed for centuries, is teeming with invertebrate life.
It’s the season for plain chocolate-coloured ringlet butterflies, and meadow browns with milk chocolate wings and a flash of orange. They are passing through, rarely at rest. But the chimney sweepers – geometrid moths with sooty wings tipped with a dash of white – settle to lay eggs on flowers of pignut, a short, lacy umbellifer growing among grasses, clover and hawkweeds.
A couple of metres away, down the slope, lie hummocks of meadow ant nests, smothered in tiny flowers of white heath bedstraw and pale blue heath speedwell. The ants are rarely seen on the surface but are, even now, in subterranean tunnels beneath me, farming honeydew secreted by aphids that feed on grass root sap.
The tallest grass around me is crested dog’s tail. Its stiff straw, once used for weaving lightweight straw hats for days such as this, makes it unpalatable to sheep. It provides scaffolding for webs spun by spiders that abseil between its culms on near-invisible threads, apparently walking on air.
What will be the highlight of this summer? There was a time when it might have been finding rare species in grander locations. But perhaps it will be this, watching hoverflies investigate my pear core, or the spider spinning a silken thread from the grass on to my knee. It seems like a kind of acceptance into the world of myriad species whose brief lives are going on all around me.
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