Last night the coyotes were extremely vocal on several occasions during the night, each time with one in particular outvocalizing the others in the running pack. It was probably inevitable that my dreams picked up on this and featured wolves running up the northwest slope and through the yard. These weren’t just your plain old garden variety wolf either, these were enormous. These were dire wolves, a recognition that was made quite clear to me in my dream. Besides, they also stood on two legs sometimes.

This segued into a party, odd in two respects, not the least of which was that we were having a party. Also, I discovered that a mother raccoon had nested in a cabinet in the party room that doesn’t actually exist in real life. Each of her twenty-something progeny was snugly placed in a paper bag (of the long narrow sort you might have a purchased bottle of wine placed in) and stacked neatly on the cabinet shelves. Needless to say *she* wasn’t happy to have been discovered.

I am of course revealing to you the source behind all this scientific naming and stacking of perfectly innocent organisms in long narrow wine bottle bags on shelves.

As a further revelation, there were the usual parking and driving frustrations that I’m prone to in dreams, and that was probably brought on by last night’s training which involved a lot of driving and parking of both the pumper and the tanker. Fortunately this was not one of those dreams where I am naked.

I’m pretty sure that this is a Funnel-Web Spider, probably an Agelenopsis. The patterning on the cephalothorax and abdomen, and especially the long spinnerets, suggest that it’s not any of the running crab or crab spiders of the last few days. There are a great many of them around at this time, and they tend to build extensive web surfaces surrounding their typical funnel. Usually they build on the ground, or take advantage of stacks of pots or rows of potted plants and build in and around these. This one was odd in that it had built within a leaf nest at the tip of the American Germander patch. They’re extremely shy, and retreat into their funnel at the slightest hint of movement, so it was unusual for this one to be so limiting its retreat space.

Still, it wasn’t exactly cooperative at being photographed, but at least it’s more than the vanishing couple of pairs of legs I usually get.


Our patches of Pussytoes (aka Woman’s Tobacco), Antennaria plantaginifolia, have really taken off after a couple of years of pouting. This little area was flowering in earnest on April 19.


In the last week, spectacular little caterpillars have taken to the pussytoes. I probably need to do a little more work with the caterpillars at later stages but in the last couple of days haven’t seen any.

The Host Plants Database only reveals one likely candidate for Antennaria, and that’s Vanessa spp. Of this, the most likely possibility is V. virginiensis, American Lady, and we do have that one.


Notice the nice coating of trichomes on the leaves that give the plant a frosty appearance!

The photographs on bugguide don’t strike me as matching this one so well, and so it could certainly be something else. Hostplants is not necessarily complete in its correlations between leps and host plants.