Spied a spider
Sunday, June 17, 2007
I suppose Iâd better offer some background. My dad worked in the construction industry. He had a tractor equipped with a back hoe and a front-end loader, which he drove around on the back of a big International tip truck. Heâd often be hired to clear land, dig footings, pools and driveways when a house was being built, or to cart the rubble away when it was demolished. As a result, there was loud earthmoving equipment around our house that would make noise from the early hours, before work, and late into the night after work when repairs were required, or teeth or buckets had to be replaced on the back hoe.
Thus, despite a garden full of fruit trees, we never had cicadas around our house in summer â all scared away by the vibrations and noise. (Flies and mosquitos still thrived, rest assured.) Once the old man retired and sold the equipment, the bugs teemed. A follow-on effect was a multitude of spiders. Sure, there was always a redback in the proverbial woodpile, the odd funnel web surfacing to make a more obvious nest if something big was left on the front lawn, and heaps of âgarden spidersâ that thrive in the summer. Now, however, we have a cicada breeding ground.
And during the spring and summer, every day presents a different, elaborate spider web. Or one arachnid empire that contiues to grow!
I usually grab the digital camera and take a quick snap of the web, knowing full well that even were I to manage to keep the right things in focus, itâs still not going to look anything as impressive in the photograph as it did in real life. So when I recently transferred about a yearâs worth of random spider and spiderweb photos to my computer, only a handful came close to looking good.
The post script to all of this is that, after processing these images late into the night, I of course was plagued by dreams, bordering on nightmares, of encounters with spiders, the one I awoke from involving an extensive network of webs in and around my computer and desk, heaving under the weight of nasty looking spiders. Which, metaphorically at least, is now exactly the case.