Country diary: strange spiders and help from the web

Crook, County Durham Within a day of uploading a picture of what I thought was one species of harvestman, I was told it was a more interesting alien

We may be living in a golden age for natural historians. The old naturalists' field clubs, rooted in the Victorian passion for collecting and sharing knowledge of flora and fauna, may be in decline, but, thanks to social media, it has never been easier to correspond with a helpful expert when you need one.

Post a picture of, say, an unfamiliar spider on the internet and it's likely that someone out there will identify it for you.