Tag: Zipper spider

Zipper Season

Timothy Price57 Comments

High winds from this storm last night broke a huge branch off Teagan’s tree, pulled the lower powerline to within inches of our fence, and the lines started arching in the trees. My neighbor alerted me of the problem early this morning. Fire department staff stood out and watched the cottonwoods south of the broken branch catching fire and going out from the arcing powerline into late afternoon before the tree trimmers showed up to cut the tree back.

The branch is on the right. It’s hard to see between the irrigation ditch and our fence in the bamboo. The branch is about 12 inches (30.48 cm) thick.

A zipper spider blocked one of the deck doors last night. She had packed up and moved on when I checked on her this morning.

Closeup of a zipper spider between Iceberg Rose and the corner of the deck.

Bromiliad

Mid-morning

Skinny Mantis

Spunk grooming Marble

Sunset

Spider Daze

Timothy Price13 Comments

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It’s that time of the year when the garden spiders are building their webs in the flowers and pathways. Last night I moved the hose from one drip system to the other, and felt something crawling on me — it was one of the zipper spiders. It had apparently built its web across the path and I didn’t see it in the low light of dusk. I felt bad that I had inadvertently destroyed her web. I moved her over to some tall grasses and she crawled off me into the grasses where she could build another web. Walking through her web reminded me of an old Far Side comic where a couple of spiders have a web built on the end of a slide and one spider is telling the other “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!” You can see a copy of the comic here: http://blogerinblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/eat-like-kings.jpg.

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