Journal: August 14

My attempt to catalog spiders (and locations) I’m watching this summer in my yard:

1. Back porch: two mabel orchard spiders, with their satellite dish to the sky webs, one common house spider, who yesterday subdued a wasp, which beat its wings furiously, but like Brer Rabbit, ever more firmly bound its legs in the sticky web in the process. The spider stood back, gesticulating now and then, like an orchestra conductor calling on the French horns, but moved in close finally, and when I left to go to Little Switzerland, seemed to be attached to the joint in one of the wasp’s legs. The wasp, which had been stabbing at the air with its stinger, was shuddering occasionally, but lying back, stretched out, suspended by its legs, which were gathered and glued together. It looked the way you would look if you were floating on your back in a stream. It was nerve-wracking watching the struggle. When I came home, the spider was still at the job of consuming the wasp. I’ll check on it again this a.m.

2. Hemlock tree by front porch. A marbled spider (araneus marmoreus) (listed in Emerton as epeira marmorea or insularis — an orb weaver who builds a web “in wooded areas between trees and shrubs. A signal line connects the hub with a retreat, made by fastening several leaves together somewhere above the snare” (How to Know the Spiders, p. 165-66). This is a very beautiful spider. I just noticed it yesterday, sitting in its retreat, which was a little cubicle about 1 inch in diameter, made from gathering twigs of the hemlock. I was not the only creature to notice the spider. A few inches away, a brown praying mantis, almost full-sized, appearing to be one molt away from acquiring wings, had its green eyes fixed on the spider. A few minutes later, when I went back to check on them, the mantis was directly on top of the retreat, with its abdomen curved upward, like a scorpion about to strike. Since there is nothing back there to do any harm — the business end of a mantis is at the other end of the body — it seemed all bluff. The spider remained in the retreat. A while later, when I checked again, the spider was still in the retreat, but the mantis had moved back onto another hemlock branch, again a few inches from the spider, still with its eyes on it. When I went out at about 6 p.m. to mow the lawn (it was murderously hot yesterday), at first I couldn’t locate the mantis, but eventually discovered it on the ground under the tree.

I will be out there at first light to see whether it still has the spider in mind. It’s a very plump and juicy spider, very beautiful, with a yellow and white and black abdomen, very Chinese and ornamental looking. The carapace is much smaller than the abdomen, as in a crab spider; the legs and carapace have a lot of orange on them, also some darker markings on the legs, which it keeps drawn up to the body. An illustration on p. 165 of How to Know the Spiders perfectly shows how it holds its body in the retreat. Since this spider is located in close proximity to the porch, where the mud daubers are hard at work on their mud tunnels, filled with eggs and paralyzed spiders for the young to feed on when they hatch, and with the praying mantis lurking above it, it seemed a very dangerous world, like growing up in a ghetto. I wondered how it had gotten as far as it had. There was no sign of the web, which may already have been destroyed, just the retreat.

3. Last night, mowing the lawn, I was dismayed to see spiders struggling out of my way. I’d skipped a week mowing the grass, in part because of the rain, so it was very thick and rank, the way it gets this time of year — trying to make sure it goes to seed before the season ends. Anyway, in addition to a couple of lumbering praying mantises, innumerable crickets and grasshoppers, and a couple of small toads, there were a number of spiders, again carrying eggcases, fleeing me. I feel like the scourge of the universe out there. It was hot as hell, even after the sun was below the treeline. Some of the spiders are very small and variegated brown, with their small white egg sacs attached to their spinnerets in the rear; some appeared to be nursery web spiders, with egg cases underneath. I tried to let them get out of the way, but I also tried not to pay much attention for fear I would be halted in my tracks, and late evening, in this weather, is the only time you can mow. Anyway, with the exception of the lower side yard, I got it done. Still have to weed-eat and weed, however.

4. Spider heaven in the chicken pen. Went back to see whether anyone had laid an egg. Of course not. Too hot, and it looks as though the Buff is either molting or fought off an attack of some sort because her tailfeathers are all over the pen, and her butt is mostly bare. Spiders are inhabiting the upper reaches of the pen, which I guess in a way is a good place, since there must be flies in the vicinity, investigating chicken droppings and garbage I throw in there that the chickens don’t eat. But on the other hand, it seems to me the chicken pen falls into the “one false move is all it takes” category. Drop down too close to a chicken, and they are in a gullet before they know it. Nonetheless, there are lots of spiders down there: a couple of mabel orchards, a funnel web at the edge of the first of the outdoor nests, and then an incredible looking thing whose abdomen looks more like a shed caterpillar skin after it had pupated than a body. I thought what I was seeing was something the spider had caught, not the spider, but when I touched it, it fled. My