Audubon: The Dream That Wouldn't Die by Sharon Delarose

Author:Sharon Delarose [Delarose, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gityasome Books
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Book Excerpt: The Wizard of Awe: An Acre of America Backyard Nature Series

Arrowhead spiders are much more intrusive than the Micrathena spiders who build webs in the wooded areas of our property. It's easy to avoid spiders in the woods -- you simply don't go into the woods.

But when a spider has a tactic straight out of your worst nightmare of a horror flick, you're sunk. The arrowhead spider drops from the trees every fall right about the time you're thinking spooky Halloween thoughts, and every tall tree produces at least one arrowhead spider.

They hang directly at face level from a single strand of thread and you don't notice them into you walk straight into one. By the time you realize there's a spider in your path, it's too late. You've already walked into her.

You'd think such a brightly colored spider would be easily visible, but who's thinking about spiders in their face when walking through a wide open area? The "open" area of our back yard isn't heavily wooded. There are just a few tall trees spaced far enough apart that we still have to mow the yard. The trees are 75 feet tall and even the lowest branches are high over our heads, so we just don't expect to walk into a spider.

Scientifically known as Verrucosa arenata, the arrowhead or triangle orb-weaver is a common spider along the East Coast, into the Great Lakes, through the Gulf States and into the South Central region. She's not poisonous to humans but she'll scare the bediddle out of you when you see her frosted yellow or white body about to bounce off your nose. It just doesn't get much spookier than that when you're thinking about Halloween, and maybe that's how spiders got their connection to the holiday. Fall becomes synonymous with The Spider Walk.

Nobody gets more creeped out than my husband Bear, who made a point to tell me that he would NOT go catch me a spider to take photos of. He knew I needed photos of an arrowhead spider and a cow killer wasp, both of which we'd encountered before, but that I hadn't taken photos of. He knew I was eagerly waiting for both to reappear.

We could count on the spider every year though it had been eluding me. Bear kept encountering arrowhead spiders when I wasn't at home but when I went looking, the spiders were long gone back up into the trees. The cow killer, however, only showed up every few years and I'd been looking for two years to get a print quality photo.

Then one day I came home to a very happy husband holding a jar. He went above and beyond the role of Perfect Husband when he caught me a cow killer wasp that he'd spotted on the driveway. He handed me the jar and said, "Here's your cow killer wasp, but I am NOT going to catch you a spider."

This made absolutely no sense to me.

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