Carrying a torch for the yellow-tailed scorpion
On a cold night in Kent, James Hanlon fulfills his childhood dream of an encounter with aliens.
Rows of dockyard lights twinkled as we approached, the car’s temperature gauge plummeting. Pick a warm night, they’d said. Clearly we hadn’t, I reflected, as we parked on the high street by a telephone box beneath an imposing brick perimeter wall. Down the road, a neon sign advertised an adult-themed shop, and from the adjoining building echoed the sound of human voices, suggesting some kind of drinking den was in operation. If there was a posh part of town, this wasn’t it.
“Look in the darkest spots, away from the streetlights.” We flicked our torches on. One emitted a small, ultra-violet beam as we moved along the wall, slowly and silently. It was very different to my last visit to the site as a teenager, 26 years earlier, when I’d caught the train here and searched for my quarry by daylight, incongruously (and naively) poking sticks into holes between bricks and annoying the resident tube-web spiders. If only I’d realised then that to truly appreciate the magic of my intended prize, you have to go under cover of darkness with the correct lighting.
Within minutes, my UV beam illuminated something in a crack in the brickwork.
A small claw glowed strongly green, its owner hidden. Further on, a leg, and further still, some pincers and a head. Eventually, we got luckier as our beams fell on our target in its entirety: a yellow-tailed scorpion, blazing like a beacon; a descendant of clandestine stowaways that had arrived on merchant ships more than 200 years earlier, and found north Kent to their liking.
Two drunken men approached and, seeing what we’d found, started jostling in a bid to take a photo. We left them to it, advising them not to pick the creature up.
Wandering back to the car, I was reminded that wildlife watching doesn’t have to take place in areas of outstanding natural beauty, nor involve native species. Just because something isn’t supposed to be here, it doesn’t follow that it’s any less fascinating. It’s good to spread the knowledge of these creatures, too. Our audience may not have remembered much in the morning, but they might find some cracking wildlife shots on their phones.
To appreciate the magic of my prize, you have to go under cover of darkness.