Transcript of AE 684 – WWP: The Wren & The Spider

Man, guys, what's going on? I thought I would do a little impromptu episode here, sort of walking with Pete style episodes, although, I am definitely not walking at the moment, I am inside. It is almost 8:00 at night. Pitch black outside, no moon. No moon at the moment.

So, very dark evening, but yeah, I wanted to tell you about today, I had a really good day, really good day. Really relaxing day, and there was just a little moment that I had at the beach that I sort of wanted to share with you because, you know, I think in today's day and age, in today's world, it's just flat chat, right? It's flat out like a lizard drinking.

It's just really fast paced, and I find myself a victim of the modern world in terms of being in my head constantly and just it's just thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Working, working, working, eating, doing this, doing that, doing that. So, anyway, what happened today? I went out, each morning, I usually go to each morning, probably about lunchtime, by the time I've gotten up, had a shower, you know, I hung out with the family a little bit, hung out with Noah and Kel, had my first morning coffee, watched the news, read a little bit, by the time I've done all of that, all that jazz, everything like that, I normally go down to the shops and I go into a little cafe on the main strip, the main street of The Terrace, which that's the name of the street here in Ocean Grove.

It's called the Terrace, the main street. And it's been really lovely, I've started, you know, going to this same cafe every single day, trying to support them throughout this difficult period, because those guys can't, they can't sell meals inside their establishment, they just have to do takeaway. That's all they're allowed to do.

I think, you know, they've got the maximum of five people or whatever it is that are allowed inside their building. So, ever since sort of Covid lockdown quarantine began in Australia, I just thought, you know what? Each day when I go out and I normally drive down to the beach, sit in a car and work for an hour or two each day that I do that, I'm going to go past my favourite cafe in Ocean Grove, and it's called Olive Pit, right?

The seed inside of an olive, Olive Pit is the name of the cafe. Shout out to them. Thank you so much, Terry, from the Olive Pit for keeping me sane, keeping me dosed up on caffeine throughout this period. But, yeah, I've developed a good relationship with those guys, really friendly and obviously now know them on a name basis. So, I go in there all the time, get my coffee, have a bit of a chinwag, have a bit of a yarn with Terry or whoever's on the coffee machine the morning or the midday that I turn up there.

Then I get in the car, drive down to 14W, it's called 14W because it is a beach west of the mouth of the bay. So, we've got Port Phillip Bay here where it's a huge bay in Victoria and Melbourne is inside of this bay, so is Geelong, but the beaches to the west of the bay along the coast get numbers, so that you can, you know, every single entrance to the beach has a different number.

So, it's, you know, 1W, 2W, 3W, 4W all the way to, you know, hundreds of W's when you go down the Great Ocean Road. So, I normally go down to 14W in Ocean Grove, park my car, there's a nice little car park there up on the sand dune overlooking the ocean. So, you can see all these people surfing, you can see the waves coming in and breaking on the shore. If it's really low tide, it's really beautiful because there's some sort of rock pools and everything down on the on the sandy, the sandy beach there.

And you can see people walking their dogs, walking past on the track on the sand dune as well as on the beach itself, because that main beach there is a dog beach, up until I think 14W is probably where you have to turn around or put your dog on a leash and go round the main beach. So, I think the main surfing, swimming beach is not allowed. You're not allowed to have dogs there.

But yeah, so each morning it's really sort of, it's been interesting because it has changed a little bit during quarantine. People, there's fewer people on the beach in the mornings, but I think they'd probably be more people over the entire period of the day because there's people locked up at home all the time. And I think you're only allowed to go outside for exercise, and so people are really making an effort to go for a walk, to go out, to walk the dog, to go for a bike ride, everything like that every day.

And obviously with a lot of us not working, there's a lot more people in Ocean Grove that would otherwise normally be at work. So, it's interesting to see how society is kind of changed and that there's sort of less traffic on the beach. In the mornings, like foot traffic, people walking around during that sort of Goldilocks period where everyone used to go to the beach before they went to work.

But now there's more people throughout the entire day. Anyway, I digress. So, I normally get my coffee, got my computer, have a book or two or one in Portuguese, one in English. Sit in the car, I open the windows a little bit on either side just to let a bit of the air in and the sound, I love smelling the sea breeze as it comes in through the windows and to be able to hear the waves, I really like hearing the waves coming in through the window, especially on days where they're sort of separated.

The waves are more rhythmic and they curl really nicely. And, so you get this sort of crashing periodically as opposed to just white noise in the background. Those days are really nice, where you have that like, "Pooofff!".

And then you can you can hear the wave wash back down the beach and then "Pooofff!" again, those days are amazing. So, anyway, today I was down there and I thought for the podcast, I'll try and record some ambient sound to put behind me speaking. I thought I'd give it a go for the expression episodes. So, I took down my little handy recorder, my Zoom HN4. Took it down to the beach, put the dead cat on it. That is the fluffy protector that goes over the microphone so that you don't hear wind all the time, right?

You know, if you're out and about and you're trying to record a video on your phone, you'll know that there's that wind sound because you don't have protection from the wind blowing past the microphone. So, I put that on there, I set this down like I sort of walk down the sand dune a little bit over the grass edge and sat right on this sort of rim, edge, knoll of the sand dune where the beach was right below me, probably about 10 or 15 metres below me. And I could just see everything, so for those of you who don't know Ocean Grove very well, it's kind of situated on this beach that goes all the way from the mouth of the bay, Port Phillip Bay from Point Lonsdale.

It goes about eight kilometres from Point Lonsdale, then you reach Ocean Grove, and then I think that goes another four or four or five, maybe six kilometres, and you reach Barwon Heads and the bluff in Bonehead. So, it's kind of like this U shape, this kind of shallow U shape. So, when you sit at 14W and you see the ocean, you're effectively right at the centre of that U, so you can see the beach curling forward out to the ocean on either side of you.

If you look towards the bay, you can see it. And if you look towards the bluff in Barwon Heads, you can also see it kind of curling forward. So, it's a really beautiful position to be in. So, I had this little spot there. I'd gotten out of the car, walked down there, and it's sandy right on the top of that dune there. There's plants all around it, but there's this little patch of sand that was really warm from the morning sun that day that had, like, warmed it up. So, I sat down, set up my recorder, started recording and sort of set it aside maybe, you know, five metres in front of me so that I wasn't breathing over the top of it or, you know, flicking through pages on my book, moving around, because it's really sensitive.

The microphone can pick up all sorts of sounds in the background, you know, people talking, dogs barking, everything like that as well. So, I set that down, set that recording, and I thought, I'll sit here for 15 minutes and just read my book whilst I wait for the recording to be made, and it was incredible.

This is what I was talking about, I guess, at the start of this episode. Normally, I sit in my car and it's relaxing, it's nice. But despite only being 20 metres away from where I was today on the dune, you're still really detached from the environment. You're kind of in this little capsule of a car, right? So, it was just beautiful today when I went down there and I was really sitting much closer to the beach up on this little mound effectively, you know, 10, 15 metres up, so I could see all around me.

I could hear voices, I could hear dogs barking and playing on the beach, kids laughing in the background, the waves crashing in, it was low tide. I could see the rock pools. And whilst I was sitting there, I was reading my book and I just felt so relaxed. It was so good to sort of be back in nature, even though, you know, there are people around me. It was so nice to be sitting there feeling the warmth from the sand on the top of this sand dune, you know, warming up my legs as I was sitting in the sand with my legs crossed, reading my book and just feeling the sand with my hands going through my fingers and everything.

It was just a really beautiful moment. And so I was sitting there reading my book, and this is the first time I've ever seen this, but there was this, what I saw out of the corner of my eye. As a little thread, it looked like a really thin string moving through the air and I thought, you know, oh, that's where it's going to catch me in the face.

And when I looked at it, there was something on the end of it, on the end, closer to the ground, and it landed right in front of me. And it was a really small spider. Now, being a biologist, I'd heard that spiders sometimes let silk out of their abdomens into the wind and they can use this, like, sort of kite, to pick them up like a kind of parachute where the wind can pick up the silk still attached to the spider and cause the spider to disperse, right?

Sort of fly away into the wind, land somewhere else safely, disperse, find a new home, find more food, find mating partners, everything like this. So, I was sitting there reading my book and this little spider landed right in front of me in the sand. And then effectively, I don't know if it wound the silk in, but all of a sudden it was sort of up and moving around.

And I was just watching it go over these tiny little bumps in the sand that I'd made with my... With my shoes, with my footprints, but which would have been effectively as big as the sand dune that I was sitting on compared to the spider. Now, whilst I was sitting there sort of watching this this spider running around, I could hear these little chirps from small birds, which are called Superb Fairy wrens.

If you've come to Australia and, especially, I think, their distribution is in the southeast of the country, you will have seen these really small, charismatic birds that are, you know, they could you could probably fit five of them in your hand, but they're always on the ground. They're really quick, and the males have this really superb blue colouration when they're mature on their head.

So, they're bright blue. It's almost iridescent, so that when they move in the light, you get these different colours of cyan, bright cyan blues, two dark navy blues. And, so I could hear these little birds flying around me, fluttering around me because they live in these sort of bushes on the sand dunes and they eat the insects and everything that they can sort of capture as they fly around and move through these bushes.

So, I could hear these guys chirping and I thought, you know, they're not going to come near me. So, I probably won't see them, but I could hear them there. I could also hear things like seagulls and some of the cormorants making sounds in the background as well. But these little birds started chirping and making a lot more noise, It started getting louder, and I realised that they were within a metre or so of where I was, flying around.

And they I'd obviously been sitting there still enough, watching this spider, reading my book, relaxing in this cross legged position for probably 20 minutes or so, and the birds were treating me like a tree or a rock, right? They didn't see me as a threat. And so all of a sudden, they were flying really close to me. So, I saw this female and the females are kind of this light brown, drab colour compared to the males, which are these, you know, which are this really bright blue colours in order to attract the females, I guess, and to also, you know, signify that I'm a male, I'm in this area, stay away.

This is my location, so I'm looking down. I looked back at the spider and all of a sudden this beautiful bright blue male just appears right in front of the spider and just picks it up in its beak swallows it. And I was like, wow, I couldn't believe it. It was literally within a foot of where I was, you know, 30 centimetres away. And it was just sitting there on the ground for a good, you know, it seemed like probably 10 seconds or so.

Just looking at me, it was probably more like one second, but yeah, he was right next to me. And I it made me appreciate that moment. And that's why, I guess, I wanted to sort of share this with you guys, because I haven't had one of those sorts of moments in nature for a long time, because I've just been caught up with working with being a new father, with reading, studying, with doing everything that I normally do.

And I had just really realised in that moment today whilst I was sitting on this warm sand dune watching nature just take its course around me, I realised how much I missed that and how important that is to get out there and enjoy, enjoy our natural environment when you can, you know, take a break, turn off, switch off from social media, from, you know, everything else that's going on that's just distracting us from enjoying those sorts of moments and sort of refreshing.

So, anyway, I just wanted to share that with you, guys. I thought to be a nice way of me telling you about my experience today and also sharing a bit of biology and local geography, I guess. But yeah, I hope you enjoy this episode, guys. And if you ever come past Ocean Grove, make sure that you go to 14W and cheque out the little dune there with the patch of sand because it's a pretty peaceful place.