------------ Here’s my wife (in the background deliberately blurred) on the first night of our summer holidays in a rented cottage in Suffolk. Off the beaten track and surrounded by forest and rabbit warren fields, the house was literally crawling with insects, which included a swarm of hornets when we opened it up after arriving late at night. When we stepped into the self-catering abode and turning the lights on, thousands of spiders frantically leapt into action bursting out of every crevice to feast on the numerous weird and wonderful insects attracted to the windows. Death, pouncing, stabbing and piercing was taking place all over the holiday home as spiders enveloped their flapping glued-up catches. I couldn’t resist lining up this photo shot from outside the house of of her indoors sitting like Little Miss Muffit of nursery rhyme fame.

------------ We’d unfortunately lost a couple of days of our holiday because of urgent work issues, so I was knackered when we arrived with a festering itchy beard badly in need of a shave. However, being an avid wildlife fan from toddler times I loved all this insect activity and recuperated for the next couple of days by slobbing around in my dressing gown taking pictures of the crawly inhabitants. Here now follows a selection brought to you with added knowledge gleaned from a handful of insect books such Michael Chinery’s classic field guide, and a couple of Collins Gem pocket ones about spiders, and butterflies and moths.

------------ This was a common inhabitant of the house. The lacewing fly comes from a soft bodied family whose cousin includes the fearsome-looking but entirely harmless scorpion fly. Green ones like this are attracted to light. The adult flies are voracious predators of greenfly, but even more so are its strange larvae youngsters. The Lacewing infant’s soft mouth conceals powerful mandibles which it deftly uses to sink into its aphid prey and drink the body contents from as if through two tiny drinking staws. But due to the virtual 100% liquid diet of this weird maggot, there’s no passage from its digestive region to its anus. The reason that Mother Nature has blocked off the youngser’s intestine is to prevent a freeflow of liquid because this wouldn’t allow the absorption of nutrients, and presumably be a distressing condition for the larvae too! This all changes when the Lacewing reaches adulthood and suddenly metamorphs an unblocked intestine - Now all those tiny solid accumulations that have been stored and compacted can be released. Thus the Lacewing fly marks its passage into adulthood by having have its first proper good poo!

------------ This pin-leggy arachnid, the cellar spider, I’d also seen increasingly at home. It hangs in a sinister manner deathly still, but then suddenly gyrates if threatened. And then back home when I looked them up in my pocket spider guide and researched on the interweb, I’ve discovered why I don’t see those bigger fast running house spiders anymore that often get trapped in the bath. The asassin-like cellar spider eats their eggs and babies. Come back carpet running, sink-trapped beastie - all is forgiven!

------------ There were also large numbers of this moth in the house, which I have identified in the guidebook as an ‘emerald’. This tells me that it has ‘length measurer’ caterpillers that have bodies camouflaged as twigs as it hangs around trees and bushes avoiding blue tits. It has a characteristic ‘looping gait’ as it travels along a twig due to only having only a couple of sets of feet, so its back feet come are brought up to its front making a loop of its body before it straightens out again to move its best feet forward.

------------ This lovely yellow moth was a one-off and was resting near the toilet. A thorn moth, it shows how subtly beautiful our night time flutterbys can be.

------------ The first morning of the holiday and welcome sun streaming through a window was framed by a massive lovely big bumblebee that must have been hiding unseen the previous night, ignoring the four clattering hornets.

------------- Here’s a deliberately blurred shot of an earwig being eaten by a spider on the inside window. Earwigs abounded in the house and surrounds, so much so that on the first morning when I opened the french windows into the garden, a herd of them streamed into the room from outside. You can see a bit of the garden and a field beyond. Both were basically sandy rabbit warrens swarming with moss and small wildflowers, against a background of insect biomass. Lying on the grass, I saw tiny creatures such as thrips and spiders I’ve never seen before. As I sunbathed an earwig walked on some lawn moss near my ear and out shot a micro spider that looked like an ant crossbreed. It managed to haul down the much larger earwig before slowly killing it over the next half hour. Maybe that’s why all the other earwigs were running into the house! The slope field in the background put the Serengeti to shame with a constant movement of rabbits, patrolling foxes and several types of deer. At night the howls, coughs, screams, hoots and cricket songs could have rivalled those African plains, or maybe even the Amazon.

------------ The strangest creature from the sandy garden was this sand like insect. My wife found it while taking out an inner tube from one of the children’s bikes that had been left outside overnight. Had it come with the tube from Lancashire, or the tube making rubber factory in some foreign clime? - I doubt it. Its sand grain camouflage pointed to it being from this biodiverse environment. And I haven’t a clue what it is!

------------ Here’s an interesting moth on the upstairs window ledge - or is it a cockroach?

------------ A few days later a hornet re-entered the house. While the rest of my family cowered, I saw a great opportunity for close ups before trapping it in a pint galss and throwing it back outside.

------------ The family were right to be frightened, the next day my son was chasing his younger sister down the track furiously on his bike during of their frequent bickering arguments, and a hornet got into his t shirt. It stung him three times before emerging from the neckline. We kept a weather eye open for subsequent allergies.

------------ Then a bush cricket jumped on my daughter in the evening.



------------ Another grasshopper type entered that evening - an oak bush cricket. Although the female has a fearsome looking stabbing backside, this is a harmless ‘ovipositer’ used for pushing its eggs into the soil. This gorgeous looking specimen is attracted to lights at night near to oak or lime trees.

------------ Mealtimes didn’t lessen the insect action. Here’s one of the many suicidal crawlies that landed in drinks, pans or in this case the hot water of a draining board. From the remains it looks like some type of parasite wasp.

------------ This moth’s colours have been sapped away by the grease from the grill pan, making identification difficult.

------------ And this particular moth avoided hot drinks and pans for the safer option of a cool cucumber drink.

------------ But it was not all spiky or night-fluttering crawlies at the holiday home - how joyously tropical does this red admiral in the front garden look!

------------ And this beetle, a longhorn type I think, looks preetty damn exotic too as it crept across the holiday home couch. The acid test - would I holiday there again - too right! It approached the biodiversity standards of the family holiday spent in a West African compound in the Gambia. Moving a couch on the first day there I thought I’d squashed flat a very large spider - only it suddenly moved at 30 mph sideways across the floor like a turbo-charged crab! I l later looked it up in my guide book of spiders, and it appears to be a wall crab spider. In the compound’s well I shone a torch down and there was a whip scorpion clinging to the side with its massively out of proportion legs and feelers looking like a dangerous alien creation - however it is completely harmless. Less so though was the large metallic green beetle that flew into the shower room. I instinctively gave it a wide berth, and was later glad I did because the ‘blister beetle’ can cause terrible pain. And then there were the little cockroaches that took the opportunity to creep into fridge when the power was down (an almost daily occurence), and the most horrible of all - the malarial mosquitos. However it all changed when Filley Colley, the compound’s housemaid arrived. With ruthless efficiency she sprayed some very unorganic looking substance freshly bought from Serrekunda Market and wiped them all out - but I never told her about the whip scorpion to spare its harmless life!