The return of the spider

Yesterday, I guided a spider to safety in case extreme weather conditions from the storm called Ophelia were going to hit the province. Since a couple of weeks, this particular spider has decided to make a habitat in front of the entrance to our backyard deck, forcing our sacred 15-year old puppy dog to take the regular entrance into the house instead of the easy backdoor way back in.

After carefully destroying her (his?) web yesterday, I was suprised to see the spider back in full force with a brand new web at the very same location with some kind of catch. Looks like a fly from here, and a big one at that. The poor thing must have been spinning its web during the rain (which stopped on or around 4-5 am) in the wee morning hours, probably trying to be ahead of suppertime, which in spiderterms equates to ‘the break after the rainfall, when all these flies head out for the green container’¹ (I hear). Smart thinking. Not so smart thinking (from a human perspective), to spin the web at the same spot. But hey, it’s my pleasure to let us species co-exist for a while: the spider’s determination serves as an example for us lowly humans.

There’s your post-Ophelia picture of a genuine storm survivor.

Our humble digicam supports both zoom and macro mode (up to 15 cms I think): I used a tripod which got me as close as +10-20 cms to the web and managed to get 4-5 pictures with 3x optical zoom (max 23.1 mm). Note that the wind was blowing too, actually towards the lens of the camera. The ones above, were some of the lucky shots.

¹ For some kind of reason it tends to attract plenty of flies.