Now this is what I call cutting in close.  The last day of the month and I officially have one post to go.  If you recall from the last post there wasn’t much concern about hitting the monthly quota being it dog show weekend with plenty of down time to crank the required two out.  When Sunday came I figured it would be easier to just post one from home rather than drag the hotspot and computer out again.  In hindsight that was probably not the best decision of the day .. although I can DEFINITELY say that was not the WORST decision of the day.  There was also a long run on the agenda but still left plenty of time for a post … well, there was suppose to be enough time but there was an “incident” after the run that preempted any further activities that night.  The details might come out in a future post, but for now let’s just say that this kid was able to meet a number of under appreciated individuals in the emergency medical arena.

Which brings us to today scrambling to get a post out to end the month.  Based on a quick review of the upcoming blog topics it was clear that you are about to get hit with a crap load of birds from our many birding shoots we’ve been on over the past year or so.  As a relief from that barrage, figured it would be a good time to get a new set of our eight legged friends out.  The pictures have been processed for awhile now, but often creeps me out enough to opt for another topic.  As punishment for what may have been a bad decision yesterday, we bring you these:

A few of my friends are deathly afraid of spiders so a warning was probably in order.  The odd thing is they have no problem with clowns which is clearly something fundamentally wrong with their mental state.  I’ll lay down with tarantulas before letting a clown get within 50 feet of me.  This particular set of arachnids came from a day out with the Macro glass.  If you want to get out and be personal with the miniature wildlife, there is nothing better than heading out in the woods with a camera and tight focus glass.  Warning, you might not be comfortable with what you find!

When out exploring the wild the focus is on capturing unique inhabitants without impacting the subjects day to day life.  That philosophy cost me a front shot of this particular spider since the only way to do that would be to jeopardize the webbing.  It was also feeding and didn’t want it to lose a meal (granted, this might have been frowned upon by the victim).  From a coolness perspective, this spidey is near the tops.  Not only does it have a stunning color palette, but has unique features like the horns and the web funnel.  Based on some quick searches of the web, it was decided that this specimen is a Micrathena Sagittata or more commonly referred to as an Arrowshaped Micrathena.  According to Spiders.US (link here) this is a mature female.  They have eight eyes and each of the legs end with three claws.  If you didn’t already figure it out, Sagittata is Latin for Arrowed which accurately describes the shape of the body (Micrathena is for the Greek small Athena – who wore armor) .  True to where this spider was found it builds the web close to the ground (less than two feet off the ground – clearly effective based on the creature it was chomping on.  They have about a year lifespan and the site indicated they die at the first hard frost.

Hit the jump to read about some other spiders that were captured that day

Continue Reading…