Bowl and Doily Spider webs seem magical, spun during a warm night in early spring and visible at first light because the dew was heavy. On two days in a row, in two different places, I happened to time my walk perfectly: the moist air made the exquisite architectural enterprises shine as if powered by their own light. A delightful though precarious synchrony of physics and biology, this integration of light, water, spider spit, and twig. And poignant, since the fact that I could see the webs meant that they would likely fail in their intended purpose. Covered by water droplets, backlit by slanting-in sunshine, they were beautiful but useless.
Maybe not useless. Perhaps, as the day warms, the strands will dry into invisibility, maybe even before the insects that the spiders want to catch warm up enough to fly. In my thirty years wandering their territory, I’ve never seen a Bowl and Doily Spider, probably because I only remember that they exist when their webs are impossible to miss, when both spider and prey are absent. I have yet to see a dry web with prey caught in it. I may know what they are called, but these spiders are a mystery to me.
What does any human really know about the intentions or fates of these unseen multitudes? I only know that when I witness their artistry revealed by a trick of light and water, the vision always stirs mixed feelings in me. Joy from the heart-stopping beauty; awe at the spiders’ craft; empathy, even sadness, for what seems like fervent hopes dashed.
Here is a poem I wrote in 2005 about the metaphors conjured by a field of glowing webs I walked through one January morning. At the time it seemed to me that the spiders had been duped by a weather pattern that might destroy not just the webs but the spiders.
Bowl and Doily Spiders in January (2005) You labored all through the long, strangely warm January night to be finished before the morning mist-rising time, as if it were spring already. But snow ended this false start at sunrise. On my way to feed the goats, Tiny crystals hung in the centers of your webs: hundreds of glistening doily bowls suspended amidst dead grass blades and the damp stalks of last year’s wildflowers. It occurred to me that you might starve, your webs too visible, your bodies too cold. I felt your peril, then walked a slow, meandering path back from the barn, stepping over and between your snow-white webs, countless upturned, empty palms. I wished I had something to offer.
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