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Our house has a big comfortable front porch
Across from the porch, about 20 feet or so away is a rather large cedar tree on the right
and a rather large hemlock tree all on the left
and the trees are not very close together and there's nothing above them
Jan and I both notice that at certain times of the morning, the way the sun is shining
you can see spiderwebs between these two trees and we kind of puzzled over this
because there is absolutely nothing up above
so how do the spiders manage too go between the trees... I don't know
I'm sitting on the front porch and I realize that I can see a spider in this space
there's like 5 feet and more feet in either direction and nothing above it
yet there is a spider in the middle of the space
a lot of it is serendipitous luck
the light is coming from behind and to the left as we are looking at this picture
so it's like ten o'clock in the morning the sun is still fairly low in the sky
and the spider and the spiderweb is brilliantly lit up
so I run and get my binoculars and I am looking at this spider
it is about maybe 30 feet from me,,, 25 feet, something like that
not real close, by any means
and I realize that the spider is going around in circles making a spiderweb
and it's pretty ...it is the kind of thing that impresses me, at any rate
so I run upstairs and the get my camera and a tripod
and I put a telephoto lens on it and I set it on the front porch
and pointed at this scene and just let it run and let it run and let it run
this is all in real time right now
the spider is busily going around and around and around
I would say that making the circles maybe took him less than twenty minutes... something like that
the movements of the spiderweb are due to the wind
there is no real wind but it doesn't take very much
to move a spiderweb that's suspended like ten feet,.. 5 feet ..on either side with nothing up above it
just little tiny puffs will make it move
the white stripe across the back is the the edge of my neighbor's house, out of focus
so we will speed it up a little that was all real time
we'll will speed up just a little bit
this is maybe about twice ,,two times speed or maybe a little bit more
you can still see him going around
he finishes up and and ends up in the middle of the spiderweb
sitting there watching
so he sitting there waiting and waiting
and of course by this point I'm definitely voting for the spider
and I'm sitting there watching......this all transpired over 10 min.
I'm watching the spider, again through my binoculars and I see bugs flying around
and the bugs are....
it all has to do with the idiosyncrasies of the way the sun is shining on the scene
the bugs are very easy to see
this is back to real-time him
the spider is sitting quietly waiting for a bug to fly by
and I see bugs flying by and I hope no one just happens to go into his spider web
I study spiders at least a little bit
and there is a specificity between the size of the spider and the size of the fly it can catch
this spider , I'm guessing is , maybe five eights of an inch in diameter including its legs
this is not a very big spider
and I think even a medium-size moth would tear up his spiderweb
but you can see the things flying around and many of them are very small
just about right for this particular spider
and then ahhh... so I go to edit this I go to down load this video
oh... and I ran video for another 15 min. hoping to catch him ...a picture of him
actually catching something but he never caught anything
and I ran out of disk space on my camera
So I come upstairs and I'm editing it and I'm looking at these videos
and thinking "these actualy came out pretty well"
I should...maybe add a little bit to this
so I took the lenses and the camera back downstairs, back out to the porch
by this time the wind, and come up and it started raining and guess what
the spiderweb, for all his work, was gone
the spiderweb was gone
so I think the lesson here might be that
there has to be a lesson
I think the lesson might be that if you're a spider
you have the great honor of being the creepiest "creepy crawler" in the land
and if you're a spider you have plenty of legs..... you never have a shortage of legs
but the other side of it is that
life is hard for a little guy like that