Tarantula III

Tarantula II

My gosh, that was one giant tarantula.

Hello, Buddy! Goodbye, Buddy!

In the kitchen, doing dishes, cleaning up, looking down. Hello, Buddy!

Here is my little friend on its way back to nature via the front steps, post-Tupperware (which is a wonderful scooping aid).

Tarantula on the Front Porch

By a rake, on the floor, for scale. She was quite large.

Tarantula Hawk

Arghhh! Why, why, why can't I get a decent photograph of the elusive tarantula hawk? So shiny, so purply-black and purply-golden, so Gorey-like as it flies around with its giant legs hanging down.

These are the only other snaps I've managed of this guy. In six years. It's sad, really.


This one is crappy but I love it anyway

Tarantula Hawk Bags Tarantula!

Hugh and I had just loaded the recycling into the truck this evening when he suddenly noticed and became very excited about something in the driveway. When I looked over, I thought at first that it was a hummingbird catching or being caught by something, but it was instead this giant bug walking backwards and dragging this tarantula along with it. I know now that the insect is a tarantula hawk, and Wikipedia has some fascinating things to say about them:

During the spiders's reproductive season male tarantulas are usually emaciated from ignoring food while searching for females. The tarantula hawks thus prefer female tarantulas and seek them in their burrows. They capture, sting, and paralyze the spider, then they either drag the spider back into her own burrow or transport their prey to a specially prepared nest where a single egg is laid on the spider's body, and the entrance is covered. The wasp larva, upon hatching, begins to suck the juices from the still-living spider. After the larva grows a bit, it plunges into the spider's body and feeds voraciously, avoiding vital organs for as long as possible to keep it fresh. The adult wasp emerges from the nest to continue the life cycle.


These wasps are relatively docile for a wasp and rarely sting without provocation though the sting, particularly of Pepsis Formosa, among the most painful of any insect. Commenting on his own experience, one researcher described the pain as "…immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations." In terms of scale, the wasp's sting is rated near the top of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, second only to that of the bullet ant and is described by Schmidt as "blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric". Because of their extremely large stingers, very few animals are able to eat them; one of the few animals that can is the roadrunner.


I believe that this is the mysterious and tantalizing purple and gold giant insect that I have been seeing flying around here, and which I've been trying to photograph, for the last five years. Except I haven't seen it that often, and I think only once before have I gotten a snap of it at all. Victory is mine! Though sadly, victory is not the tarantula's.

Tarantula Season 2008!

Or, OK: I'm Ready for More Spiders Again


Top: found inside on a windowsill. I learned that the tall SCARP container is not the best for tarantulas, as they don't want to come out after you put them in it. Shallow tupperware is better.

Below: found just outside the front door. Conceivably it's the same guy with very different light....but it IS tarantula season. They begin to abound.

Devastation and the Calm After the Storm

There was a tremendous, GIGANTIC storm last night. It was bad; at one point I thought that the bathroom window had been broken by the hail (it wasn't), but I was so preoccupied with the cat who'd run out into the night (who is fine) and worrying about our nesting birds in the storm that I didn't really think about the storm itself. It wasn't until I let the dogs out this a.m. before leaving for work that I realized HOW bad it had been. The outdoor furniture and recycling were blown all over the place, but worse was the tree where the woodpeckers nest—the top of it is gone! Just gone! Even so, I could hear the little birds within, and I saw both parents coming as usual with food (you can see one in the photo if you enlarge it). The cardinal nest is also intact, but I don't know about the porch-skull-nesting wrens; I didn't see the parent birds this morning or evening, and I can't hear the babies, and I cautiously nudged the wind-whipped skull slightly back into place tonight with no sign or sound from within. I was certain they were going to fledge any day now, so it's possible they did so this morning or sometime yesterday. I hope so. Tomorrow I am going to look into the nest...


The evening sky: gorgeous. Driving home, looking west, it was both beautiful and sort of creepily yellow, in the way that future storms sometimes appear; but then the light smoothed out into being just pretty and calm.


This tarantula was huddled into the intersection of steps and wall beneath the wrens' nest this morning. They always look so shy and scared. He was gone by the time I got home tonight.