The 429 spiders and 26 harvestmen species covered in this book form a significant proportion of the c700 spiders and 31 harvestmen in the UK which would have come as a surprise to Martin Lister who wrote the first book on English spiders which described 34 spiders and three harvestmen, opining that there was little likelihood that further species would be found in Britain. But that was 1678, and this is an up-to-date account of how many species, which species and where they have been found in Yorkshire’s five vice counties. It builds on Clifford Smith’s 1982 Atlas of Yorkshire Spiders which was the first such county spider atlas in the UK.
The book is full of maps of spider distribution, tables of data and images of species. If spiders are your thing, then this is a book for you, particularly, but not only, if you live in Yorkshire. There are some gaps in the maps which it would be fun to fill. It looks as if some arachnologists have been to the end of Spurn Point to look for spiders but the Spurn Peninsula as a whole looks like it could do with some more attention. There might even be some species to be found in the bird observatory building? Or the visitor centre?
Spiders are not an easy group to identify. Some need particular combinations of equipment, knowledge, skill and inclination to identify by dissection. But they are all around us. Before I started a 2025 wildlife bioblitz of my house and garden I had paid scant attention to spiders with just a few species known to me, and very much biased towards the celebrity species such as Fen Raft Spider, Ladybird Spider and Wasp Spider but now, more through the observations of Graeme Lyons than myself, my garden list of arachnids is 58 species. I have added a few of those species myself including Nigma walckenaeri (which you will find on the back cover of this book) which was first recorded in Yorkshire in 2018. Even an absolute novice might find new records of this species, which helps the naive observer by being bright green. Have a look at ivy leaves in your garden, in car parks and in pub gardens and you might add to our knowledge of spiders in Yorkshire and surprise and delight yourself at the same time.
This is an attractive book which is a good example of clear presentation of data. It is a landmark publication and surprisingly attractive to flick through.
The cover? That’s definitely a spider and it could easily be in Yorkshire (it is, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park). I’d give it 8/10.
The Spiders and Harvestmen of Yorkshire: an atlas by Richard I. Wilson is published by Pisces Publications.
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