Garden Spider – forty years ago in my nature notebooks

The Garden Spider, Araneus diadematus, is a species I first wrote about in my nature notebooks in 1976.

Here’s one at the centre of its web in 2017:

It’s 41 years since I drew it, standing outside the back door of my parents’ Oldham terrace:

“Yellow legs with orange-red tips.”

I experimented with it:

I was very impressed that it could build its web in the dark.

In Bristol it’s built a large web next to a busy road in the daylight:

The one thing I didn’t remember about it from my nature notebooks was just how hairy its body was:

Lovely.