I never post creatures in the Coffeehouse.

I was mowin' the lawn for the first time at our new place this afternoon.

My property line buts up against a wooded area.

The guy who mowed it prior to me had a smaller, shorter mower so he could get under the trees. I have a Kubota tractor with a belly mower so I sit up higher and the roll cage hits the tree limbs.

I drove through a gi-norm-ous web of Wolf Spiders very similar to the one pictured below and the web caught on my frickin' roll bar and it draped from my head to the roll bar and stuck there. I had them crawling all over me and the tractor.



The neighbors must have thought I was nuts. I'm out there swinging my arms wildly, pulling web off me, swatting spiders, all the while my tractor is still moving ahead veering off to the right headed straight for the pond.

Now I'm so creepy crawly I could shave my head and scrape my skin off with a giant brillo pad and I still wouldn't get any relief.

I ... HATE ... spiders.

We had them in the house, they are actually everywhere down here this year because of the drought and hot weather. They move in doors where it's cooler when it gets this hot. I had the entire house sprayed before I'd move a single box in. These things are fearless. They'll sit there in the corner and hiss at you and stare you down man. They are frickin' nasty. And that picture doesn't do them justice. They can get 2 inches long and have two back legs like crickets and look like they could jump 10 feet if they wanted to.

Ahhh!

Man, I want to scrape my skin off just reading that.

I don't like em either.  having them all over me like you described would have really freaked me out, too!  that happened to me one time - walking thru the woods on a path and this egg sack in a spider web burst just as I walked under it and hundreds of tiny little baby spiders flew out and on me! 

gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about that again!

mike_mccue


We also have Yellow Orb Weavers out in the forest which get rather large, feel sort of spiky and have really tough yellow colored webs that stick to you and feel gooey yet tenacious. They have a habit of making there webs right across the trails as it seems the trails have become "flyways" for insects as well as paths for terrestrial traffic. 

The only worse than spider are leeches. In grade school a buddy of mine outside of Kansas City jumped into a pond to cool off from the day. I was about to join him when I noticed these 3 inch black things pressed all over his body. Probably 30 or more. Yeeeewwww. We spent 30 minutes picking them off.

We used to hunt wolf spiders at night with a flashlight. You hold the flashlight just under or beside your eyes and shine it out onto the lawn...green eyes in the night. There are more spiders than you could ever imagine. 
There is always a spider within 3 to 6 ft of you... unless you are mountain climbing, scuba diving or something weirdlike that. 
In ungrazed pasture there are about 130 spiders withing a few feet.

Then there is this: http://blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org/gardenplot/2011/09/16/never-more-than-10-feet-away/


You've probably heard or read at some point that, "you're never more than 10 feet away from a spider." Sometimes it's 6 feet, sometimes 3. According to the American Museum of Natural History, this estimate is low:

An acre of English meadow in late summer has been estimated to contain more than 2 million spiders, and it's safe to assume that wetlands and undisturbed forest contain significantly more.

That's about 46 spiders per square foot!


Have a wonderful day!!!!


Julien