This is the time of year when smart people are very careful as they wander through East Coast woods -- which are well-stocked with ticks, mosquitoes and poisonous snakes.
Smarter people just stay out of the woods altogether, I suppose.
But not being very smart, I went wandering on Memorial Day, sweeping the swampy ground before me with my well-worn walking stick to give myself fair warning if a grouchy cottonmouth might be napping nearby.
I saw no snakes. I never do. It's very odd, for surely they are there, somewhere, watching the woodland through serpentine eyes. But I did photog this awesome little spider on a berry bush. (Not shown are the hordes of mosquitoes that siphoned my vital fluids while I attempted to get this shot. Atheists get one point against God for the existence of mosquitoes.)
3 comments:
Update: My smart friends tell me that this critter is an Orchard Web Weaver, Leucauge venusta. It dwells on small shrubs and such.
It's so easy to get wrapped up in our human world and forget that life dramas great and small go on around us every day.
I'll never forget the day I found a tiny tree frog hopping lost within the building where I work --so small that I nearly missed seeing it.
Somehow it survived passage across the murderously hot and huge asphalt parking lot that borders its home in a narrow creek -- but the interior of this office building wouldn't be much of an improvement.
I carried it back to the creek in a paper cup. This creek has probably flowed through here for a million years, through deep, shady, life-giving woodlands that have now been suddenly stripped away so that cars may park and humans such as myself may earn money.
More trivia;
"Leuc" means "white" -- I guess in reference to the silvery color of this genus. Venusta means beautiful, which it certainly is, in its own way.
It is found in eastern and central North America and as far south as Panama. Why not further west? Those old Rockies again, I suppose -- the biological Berlin Wall of North American species dispersal.
And why not further south than Panama? I'm no expert but I do know that South America and North America were once separate continents, only recently banging together (in geological time, that is).
This pretty little spider apparently hasn't yet exploited that big lump of land that slammed into its southernmost neighborhood.
You are a wonderful person, Adena. You bluster about being "bitchy" and such but I see through the facade. There's a whole lot of sweetness going on there.
Post a Comment