August is spider season. The orb-weaver spiders in my yard spend winter tucked away in the egg sacs their mothers made for them in autumn. Come springtime, the spiderlings climb out of their egg sacs and promptly disappear. Lots of creatures will eat a baby spider, so early summer is for hiding. By late summer, those who managed to survive are all grown up and ready to commence their important spider work.
To an orb-weaver, August is for web-spinning and bug-devouring (also, sometimes, mate-devouring). To me, August is for spider-spying. I can think of few things more beautiful than a spiderweb drenched in dew, water droplets lined up like diamonds on invisible silken threads.
Normally, spider-spying would mean going outside at dawn. Orb-weavers spin their webs in darkness and devour them again as night turns to day. But this year an orb-weaver has set up camp outside our bedroom window and turned the entire expanse of glass into a spider-studying station — like those demonstration beehives that fit into classroom windows, half in and half out, or the bird feeders that attach to glass with suction cups.
In August, we have cobweb spiders building in the corners of every window in the house, but we have never had an orb-weaver take up residence in a window before.
The web-construction part of this spider’s operation is typical for orb-weavers: anchor lines, a center hub and spokes, and finally the sticky circular threads that set the spider’s table. What’s not at all typical — at least it’s not typical of any orb-weaver I’ve ever seen before — is the structure this spider has built for herself into the lines that are part of the permanent structure of her web.
It’s a little spider house, the size of a quarter, that hangs right in the middle of the window.
She has built her hideaway of silk and oak catkins, the dried strings of flowers left over from our white oak’s spring bloom. The catkins form the sides and yard-facing wall of the house. Our bedroom window is its back wall. All day long she rests in there, within full view of us but safely hidden from predators in the yard. Even the Carolina wrens that patrol our windows, inspecting cobwebs for the possibility of tasty spiders, have not spied this clever orb-weaver in her catkin bower.
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