kmkat and her kneedles

Thursday tales: wildlife (of a sort).

There is a lot of wildlife here, especially the kind under 1".

Some of it is cute, like a tree frog on the screen.

 

Some, like ticks, not so much.

Some is strangely beautiful .

 

Some is just weird. Meet Spider Mama! 

She walks, she climbs, she dances, she waddles! 

 

And her distant cousin does pushups! Although not in time to the music.

 

An impressive one in my kitchen sink.

Of course, spiders leave mementos of themselves (besides baby spiders). These are not the same web, although the space around my sink is a favorite place for late summer spiders.

 
2008                                                                        2013

 

2011                                                                                                   2009 

Often the webs last well into the winter.

 

Sometimes we find the wildlife on vacation.

 

We need to dispose of them.

Let us not forget the ubiquitous mosquito.

 

Why am I frightening you/grossing you out with all this? So that I could show you these, which are evidence of a particularly annoying species of wildlife.

Under the deck.

In every nook and cranny of the eaves.

 

Both ends of the pole barn.

 

The detached garage. Oddly enough, the other end of this garage
is the only eave angle that doesn't have a hive.

I did not get a photo of the wasp nest in the Volvo in the front yard. Smokey, Matthew, and Ser Percival The Energetic alll got stung before the nest was destroyed. There are probably other nests that were uncovered and obliterated, or are still undiscovered, around the place. 

What wasps are good for (NSFW if you work in any sort of a civilized place.)

And thus endeth your latest lesson on Living In The Woods.

If spiders creep you out, do not read this.

Stories from the life of The Kat™, part 1.

Here in the woods there are a lot of species of wildlife under an inch long.* 

This is the story of one of them.

Back in the mid-90s when we were here only in the summer and weekends, I decided to prune the dead branches out of the spreading junipers in the front yard. Junipers are prickly suckers, so I wore heavy gloves and tried not to touch them any more than necessary. To this last end, I threw all the pruned branches onto a large sheet of cardboard so I could drag them away all at once.

After pruning for awhile, I stopped to rest and to admire my pile of branches. It was at this point that I noticed a good-sized spider (about 1" long) with an astonishingly hairy abdomen walking across the cardboard. I looked closer and poked it with my pruners.

Imagine my amazement when the hairiness of her abdomen turned out to be about a hundred baby spiders, which jumped off and ran in all directions. I immediately summoned the family to witness this wonder of nature.

Googling today taught me that this was a wolf spider, the only spider in the world that carries its babies in that manner.

Gizmodo article with photos.

This is pretty much what I saw, but in focus, without the smoosh, and without the reflections of the babies eyes.

A number of years later, I took this photo, which is probably the most stunning image I have ever captured.

Wolf spiders are also the only ones that carry their unborn/unhatched babies around in an egg sac. Like all spiders, they are venomous, but not unduly so, plus they will only bite if continually provoked. They are generally considered to be beneficial because they eat other arachnids.

And that is all you ever wanted to know about wolf spiders.

* More on this in another post.