Category: spider

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Precious Bugs

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It’s the time of year when spider webs waft through the air from impossible heights in the oddest of places and often capture falling leaves along the way. Of course there is a spider somewhere responsible for each of these, but what I see is a magic leaf, seeming to hang and dance but not fall, held in the air by an invisible tether. I saw two of these instances today, in very different places, so I took a picture of the second–a sourwood leaf suspended above our road. Because this September the webs I’ve run into have been few and far between. I had to remove a very scary spider from my room before I went to bed last night (not pictured). This one was of the wolf variety. Not a web-maker. More of a marauding hunter. It was tricky to get at it with the empty yogurt container (my bug removal device of choice) both because it was near the corner of the wall and because I had to move a floor lamp to reach him, which I did as carefully as I could, praying he wouldn’t move. Just a foot or so from him was a crevice he could easily hide in, between painted cinderblock wall and concrete floor (no baseboards in this room). And I had to crouch and reach without throwing a shadow across him. Slap of plastic onto wall then scrape of cardboard square sliding between plastic and wall, and he was with me traveling to a new home outside the front door. All of this happened swiftly (I’ve moved hundreds of spiders from inside my house to out over the decades I’ve lived here), but this year such encounters have been particularly focusing for me. I think it is because there are fewer of them. Insects, that is. I used to be afraid of insects. They seemed to be everywhere, and I knew nothing about them. Now, I’m seeking them out. I am thrilled to see them, mostly. Especially when they are outside, like the caterpillar pictured above, who looks like she’s wearing a fancy dress costume. Apparently she belongs to a group that has earned the title “dangerous saddleback caterpillars,” and will turn into what is unpoetically called a slug moth (about as handsome as the name implies). But I didn’t know that when I was inspired to photograph her in her… Continue reading

Doily Bowl Spiders in Spring

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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… Continue reading