Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
Get out there and celebrate bees! I’d like to. I tried. But right now we’re drowning in near constant rain and drizzle and cool temperatures, so all our bees are hiding. We’ve planted lots of bee-friendly flowers in our yard, but they haven’t blossomed yet.
I guess I’ll have to settle for this poor photo I took last year.
My excuse is that I’m usually looking for spiders, and it’s pure chance that I might click the shutter when a bee wanders by. Still, I appreciate them, especially since they can be a good source of spider food.
Oh no. They’re not as interesting as spiders.
Downy Woodpecker
Maybe I need to tell Mary to take more photos of birds.
I told you I was running away from home this afternoon! I was walking for 2 or 3 hours, and now my quads are killing me–I’ve been sedentary for too long. I didn’t have much luck finding any interesting spiders, but the bushes are alive with spider food, swarms of gnats and midges, and if you feed them they will come.
As soon as I got home, of course, I find a spider on my garage door. It’s a very small Attulus fasciger, and it has been hunting successfully. That’s a midge of some sort, totally wrecked in the spiders jaws.
Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider
More will be coming. It is that time of year. Hooray!
I haven’t shown off my tarantula, Blue, in a while. They’re doing well, having a hearty breakfast.
Getting bigger, too.
Of course it did. Baleen whales don’t have teeth to chew him up, and their throats are too narrow to swallow him whole, so this kayaker just had a brief, fun little trip to tell his friends about.
My wife’s flower patch:
My wife has been keeping an eye on a chrysalis on the neighbor’s garage, and this morning it looked like this:
Empty! Where did the former resident go? It was stretching and warming itself up on a twig down below.
We have to celebrate every single monarch that emerges, because they’ve become too uncommon nowadays.
You know, I was stung by a yellowjacket the other day, when all I’d done was try to visit their nest and say hello. It still hurts a little bit, ow ow ow, have pity on me, etc.
Today my wife tells me she put out a water dish for them, in case they were thirsty.
Whose side is she on, anyway?
I told you I’d try to get better pictures of that nest in my yard.
I learned my lesson. I used 8 feet of PVC pipe to increase my reach. Next time, 20 feet.
