We know we have a lot of bats living above our garage — it’s non-trivial to check, though. There’s an access panel in the garage ceiling and you need to use a ladder to climb up there. But I imagine it might look a little like this if you climbed up and rummaged around behind the insulation.
I think maybe we’ll leave our bat colony alone.
At least the caterpillars are thriving.
She sure didn’t wash the windows.
I looked out my windows last night and saw this big bright green Scudderia hanging out on the glass door. Man, I am itching to get out and do some field studies, but it’s not happening for a while.
I caught these two fooling around on the milkweed, naturally.
I also collected 3 Parasteatoda egg sacs nearby, so it’s not just the beetles getting in the mood.
In my state of limited mobility, the best I can do is roam around my yard looking for spiders. I’m not seeing any, other than a few Parasteatoda in the garage and compost, despite the fact that we’ve got lots of flowers, and it’s mid-July, and you’d think they ought to be thriving. We don’t even have any grass spiders!
What we do have is clouds of flies. Just hovering swarms of little bitty flies hovering around everything.
Come to my yard, spiders! There is a feast awaiting you!
It happened to be right there as I walked into the house. It’s too hot to go looking for them.
Could it be…a Monarch?
I was sitting at my computer this morning, when a fuzzy, tiny blob slowly lowered itself before my face. I looked closely at it, and it was a single strand of spider silk with a dead mosquito at the end of it. I tried to take a photo with my phone, but it was too small and close. Here it is, anyway.
Now it’s possible that some ceiling spider was fishing for humans, but I prefer to think that it was a spider cult offering a sacrifice to their god. I couldn’t hear what they were chanting, so I don’t know if they were praying for anything, and I prefer to think they were just expressing their gratitude.
Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
