‘I still can’t handle the big ones’: the new wave of spider hunters scouring Britain’s heaths

Having already discovered the presumed extinct great fox-spider, Mike Waite goes hunting on MoD land armed with a pair of his wife's tights, an old medicine syringe and plastic cups

As a spider-hunting specialist, Mike Waite's artillery of choice is a pooter. It's a homemade sucking contraption made from his daughter's old Calpol syringe and a pair of his wife's tights (I like to think they were old ones"), which he uses as a filter so he doesn't inhale any spiders.

I'm with Waite, from Surrey Wildlife Trust, on Brentmoor Heath, which is partly owned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and managed by the trust. It sounds like New Year's Eve, with continuous bangs from the shooting range. We're in the buffer zone, on lowland heathland, where the public are allowed and spiders are just waking up from their winter slumber. We see a wolf spider, a gorilla jumping spider, and a raft spider (which recently featured on David Attenborough's Wild Isles) all in a single morning.