Spiders

Heads up – if spiders freak out out, stop reading now. The “worst” of the pictures should still be out of sight at the bottom of the post and you can’t see them yet. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

Among the many critters that we have here in the urban jungle, so far I’ve mentioned only the mammals, the birds, and Fred the Lizard. But as with most anyplace else, we have spiders.

We don’t get a ton of them inside and the ones we do get seem pretty benign. We do have to do a sweep for webs periodically and occasionally squish a spider who’s particularly bold about being out where we can’t ignore him. For the most part however, it’s live and let live since they’re scarce and well hidden. Out of sight, out of mind.

Outside is a different story. With lots of trees and bugs and a semi-arid environment, spiders are the norm. It’s that whole “ecosystem” thing.

On a regular basis we have to sweep and hose down the outside glass on the windows as they pick up an assortment of cobwebs, which in turn pick up dirt and debris.

A lot of the plants will also pick up these sheet webs of some sort or the other. No worries. If it doesn’t bother Jessie when she goes crashing through the bushes, it doesn’t bother me.

But today I’ve noticed something new. In the back yard, clearly visible from my home office window and the living room windows, are a couple of incredibly long and industrial strength threads going across a ten-foot gap between two trees. Especially late in the day, they caught the sunlight and really were noticeable.

The existence of such a thread isn’t news, but this one seems almost unbreakable as the branches of the two trees have been banging around pretty good all day and this thread has hung in there. (Yeah, yeah, stronger than steel gram for gram, better tensile strength, blah, blah, blah. Even so…) In addition, it appears to be much thicker than a “normal” spider web thread, almost looking like forty-pound test mono filament fishing line.

Is this from one of Charlotte’s relatives? Only if Charlotte got into Alex Rodriguez’s leftover PED stash! Or if she’s trying to catch a bat instead of butterflies.

I guess that’s not 100% a joke. We do have bats that fly around every night. I’m a big fan of bats and I like seeing them in the neighborhood. They’re interesting and they keep the bug population down. I know that there are spiders big enough to catch bats (Google it yourself if you wish, the images I pulled up just freaked me out big time) and spiders big enough to catch bats are supposed to be found on every continent except Antarctica. I still wouldn’t expect any of them here in LA — maybe Texas, part of that whole thing about everything being bigger there. If they are here, it’s time for a search and destroy mission and I don’t care how rare or endangered they might be!

One way or the other, I don’t want to think of Charlotte trying to kill Stellaluna, especially in my yard! (Although when that children’s book gets written, I expect the audiobook to be read by Samuel L. Jackson.)

Finally, speaking of eight-legged critters that are also on my kill-on-sight list, we get a few of these nasty little buggers from time to time:

Long ago and far away, when the first two kids were toddlers and Michi was still to come, we moved into a house with a completely overgrown back yard and a narrow walkway between the house and a cinder block wall. It didn’t take long before I figured out that that narrow passage was Black Widow Heaven, hundreds of them out there, particularly at night. In order to protect the kids, I got rather aggressive in wiping out the “widder spidders”.

Now days, we’ll occasionally see that tangled, random web that’s their signature off in some corner, indicating that we’ve got a new one. They don’t last long – it’s easier to kill one or two now than a few dozen later. At this house they also tend to hang out in places where I walk in the dark occasionally (like around the trash cans) and I don’t need that kind of surprise. I’ve used up enough adrenalin this year.

But I do wonder what’s moving into those pine trees now.