Saturday: 18 August 2007
We actually got a small amount, 0.05 inches, of rain yesterday. Naturally it would come while I was otherwise engaged in a meeting in Athens. I was a little miffed to have missed it, but it did wet the ground and vegetation, and that’s all to the good.
Our training session on Thursday night was to have been with Oconee County VFDs, helicopter rescue. We even caravanned to northwest Oconee County, 20 miles away, but only to discover that due to the extreme dry heat they had decided to reschedule the training for another time. Station #8’s Captain did give us a fine tour of their station and well-appointed engines, so we did make the best of the trip.
The front porch has become a major attraction for arachnids lately. An argiope has made a precarious and poorly strategized selection of the corner, at eye level, of the kitchen door, and a modest-sized fishing spider Dolomedes tenebrosus has staked out the entire deck as its territory. I’ve run across it, or more the reverse maybe, both yesterday and this morning, actively hunting.
I took a side excursion to the barely flowing Goulding Creek yesterday and was rewarded with this large, plush Pisaurid:
She had stitched together the top leaves of a mint for her nursery (first thumbnail below) and was perched atop the construction. She immediately fled into the nest when she caught sight of me. I gently pulled apart the leaves and she took up position on one of them, and was thereafter cooperative.
On June 22 I photographed a Pisaurid nesting atop a pitcher plant, and had identified it as Pisaurina mira, but I now think that was actually P. brevipes and that *this* one is P. mira. I’m going by the body patterning and degree of hairiness, mostly, but scanning over the Pisaurid photographs at Bugguide it looks like even they may have gotten a few of the photographs switched between species. In fact, I’m still not entirely certain - Cal Photos has a matching shot of P. mira here, and the Nearctic Spider Database shows a match to June 22 as P. brevipes here. But Bev’s PBase page on Pisaurids shows P. mira to more closely resemble my June 22 catch. I’m *fairly* certain, anyway, that yesterday’s is not a Dolomedes species.
Anyway, it’s a big furry teddy spider!
And a few other photos of additional vantage points:
Our training session on Thursday night was to have been with Oconee County VFDs, helicopter rescue. We even caravanned to northwest Oconee County, 20 miles away, but only to discover that due to the extreme dry heat they had decided to reschedule the training for another time. Station #8’s Captain did give us a fine tour of their station and well-appointed engines, so we did make the best of the trip.
The front porch has become a major attraction for arachnids lately. An argiope has made a precarious and poorly strategized selection of the corner, at eye level, of the kitchen door, and a modest-sized fishing spider Dolomedes tenebrosus has staked out the entire deck as its territory. I’ve run across it, or more the reverse maybe, both yesterday and this morning, actively hunting.
I took a side excursion to the barely flowing Goulding Creek yesterday and was rewarded with this large, plush Pisaurid:
She had stitched together the top leaves of a mint for her nursery (first thumbnail below) and was perched atop the construction. She immediately fled into the nest when she caught sight of me. I gently pulled apart the leaves and she took up position on one of them, and was thereafter cooperative.
On June 22 I photographed a Pisaurid nesting atop a pitcher plant, and had identified it as Pisaurina mira, but I now think that was actually P. brevipes and that *this* one is P. mira. I’m going by the body patterning and degree of hairiness, mostly, but scanning over the Pisaurid photographs at Bugguide it looks like even they may have gotten a few of the photographs switched between species. In fact, I’m still not entirely certain - Cal Photos has a matching shot of P. mira here, and the Nearctic Spider Database shows a match to June 22 as P. brevipes here. But Bev’s PBase page on Pisaurids shows P. mira to more closely resemble my June 22 catch. I’m *fairly* certain, anyway, that yesterday’s is not a Dolomedes species.
Anyway, it’s a big furry teddy spider!
And a few other photos of additional vantage points:
