Sat 3 Jul 2021 00.30 EDT
Itâs an untimely Halloween prank, surely. Iâm walking the tracks and paths where I live, grateful to be clearing my head after going out last night â Iâm out of practice. Yet my fuzzy brain is not imagining things. A small bushy tree that last time looked entirely normal is today shrouded in cobwebs. For a second, I wonder if itâs been netted, in that awful modern way, to prevent birds nesting. But no, this is an entirely natural sticky spread of greying silken web.
And the bush appears to be moving. I step closer to find a squirming, squiggling mass of caterpillars festooning its branches and twigs, most hidden beneath the web as if trapped inside. There are too many to count: hundreds, each about 2cm long. Most are yellowish, some a grubby grey, all with a neat black spot on each segment. The web is dotted with their excrement. En masse, they make my stomach turn, even though Iâm fascinated.
Julia Donaldson: Edward Lear taught me that there can be a lyrical beauty in nonsense | Books
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Presented by nature writer Richard Mabey
This is an online event hosted on the British Library platform. Bookers are sent a link in advance giving access and can watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time.
Gilbert White was perhaps the first English naturalist, whose careful observations of his village laid the foundations of modern ecology, influencing Charles Darwin and generations of writers and artists.
Celebrate the summer equinox with ‘Britain’s foremost nature writer’ Richard Mabey who will tell White’s story, drawing from his book which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 1986.
White’s
The Natural History and Antiquities at Selbourne was published in 1789 and was an immediate success. The book has never been out of print and is considered one of the earliest contributions to natural science. White was visionary in his scrupulous attention to the interconnected lives of the plants and animals on his doorstep.
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