Bonding With Spiders
It was on this same bird-studying expedition to Australia in 1968 that I had my own spider-bonding experience, one that, to my mind at least, ranks with the fictitious pairing of James and Amelia. It was October and we had set up camp just outside Oenpelli (now known as Gunbalanya) in Northern Territory. One of our tents was a laboratory where we prepared our birds as study skins, skeletons or spirit, by which the bird was preserved whole in formalin. The work tables were a general mess of cotton wool, bottles, dissecting kits, notebooks and data sheets.
The spider must have entered the tent at night, climbed the table leg and snuggled down in the cotton wool at my work space. That meant it was waiting for me. Since first light I had been out collecting more birds and now, fed and rested, I needed to process them and write up my notes during the heat of the day. Colleague Tony Hiller was standing at the entrance to the tent when I sat down and reached for the cotton wool. He said something and I looked up, opening the cotton wool as we spoke. The first thing I felt was the gentle touch of its feet as it climbed out of the cotton wool onto the back of my right hand. I sat and looked at it, detached, as its clustered eyes stared straight at me, its enormous fangs just a millimeter from my skin. Tony also saw the spider, and could see the panic mounting on my face. Being fearless, he casually offered the sensible advice of letting it go where it wanted. But the spider was on me, not him. It stopped at my elbow as though contemplating its next move.
Inside the humid tent, under the midday sun, I began to sweat even more than usual. A kind of paralysis set in and I found myself unable to do anything but watch as the spider tiptoed slowly towards my shoulder. I was all alone in my own little nightmare of nature. There was no Doug on standby, no director to cut the shot, no writer to turn the spider round. This was not acting. This was the real thing.
Before Tony had a chance to come to my rescue, my mind and body arrived at the same involuntary breaking point that Sean Connery had portrayed so convincingly on film. With a loud vocal outburst – I must have been holding my breath while all this was happening – I jumped up and, with a violent sweep of my left hand sent the spider flying. It hit the far wall of the tent, dropped to the floor, raised its upper body to expose its fangs and began a fierce kind of arachnid square dance. There was an audible crunch as it collided with a table leg and drove its fangs deep into the wood.
Both shaken and stirred, I sat and watched its antics with a growing sense of relief, taking long deep breaths. As the oxygen surged through my body, my head cleared and I just knew that the bond between me and that eight-eyed monster of a spider was, like diamonds, for ever. I was seized with a desire to keep it. But not alive. It would have no more license to kill. Gripping the longest pair of forceps I could find, I approached the angry spider, clamped it between metal shafts and dropped it into a jar of 70% alcohol. Two days later, I lifted it out and laid it on the table. Quite incredibly, its legs began to move. It went straight into a large pot of formalin and from there, the following week, into a small bottle of alcohol.
Four months later, early in 1969, I handed my bottled trophy to museum Spiderman, Doug Clark, in London. It came back neatly labelled ‘Neosparassus margareyi, female’, an accompanying note advising that she was, or at least had been, fairly poisonous. She was a hunter, and although not one of those hairy bird-eating Amelia types, was still 16 cm across her outstretched limbs, which were thin and spiky, built more for speed and distance than for stealth and ambush.
Doug’s Amelia lived in the Natural History Museum until she was at least fourteen. Her cast-off skins, shed annually as she grew, were mounted in a glass box and put on public display. My own spider sits on a shelf at home in the same bottle where it began its physical afterlife in 1968 – the permanent reminder of a moment of fear.
That fear, as deep-rooted in me as in anybody who doesn’t like spiders, may have originated in our African ancestors a million years ago; a million years, that is, before the real James Bond published his Birds of the West Indies and Ian Fleming, still without a name for his special agent, fixed himself another martini.
The King baboon spider Pelinobius muticus is a tarantula species native to East Africa which can grow up to 20 cm in leg span.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE CREEPY-KIND
Mangroves & Man-Eater’s with Dan Freeman takes readers on an International Adventure filled with Danger and Discovery!
B E
TRAVEL
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