Yes, there’s a spider at that door, just slightly left of center. By morning, there’s a spider at every door and window that keeps a dim nightlight on. We’ve learned long ago to duck when exiting and entering the house in the early morning. I guess we could keep the house totally dark inside, but I don’t really mind. If we wait a bit, she’ll take her web down and tuck it neatly away in some cranny where she’ll wait out the day.

You know it’s really autumn when the Neoscona crucifera starts making her nightly webs. While they certainly are fine with being as low as the doors, we also see them stringing their webs thirty or more feet into the sky, between trees, and that would earn them the name “arboreal orb weaver.”

Everything about her habits seems to suggest an avoidance of predators, and the nighttime web building is just one of them. Another is that you don’t really see them all that much until we’re past the hot temperatures that spider wasps seem to like so much, and then they persist through some remarkably cold nights.

I find that I’ve treated this large charismatic araneid before, so I won’t go into details.



Yesterday we were called at 6:30am to a three-vehicle accident about eight miles away, and that occupied most of the morning for us. They wanted us for our fantastic portable lighting system, but by the time we had to route around the detour it really wasn’t needed. Instead we pulled the pumper across the the main highway and blocked traffic from continuing along that route into Athens.

It was a really bad accident, with three fatalities resulting from collision of a light pickup truck with a flat bed carrying empty chicken cages. The cab of the flatbed was accordioned into the embankment, and the pickup wasn’t recognizable as a vehicle at all.

Forestry brought their six-wheel gator, and that was the only way of transport in the drizzly wet from the bottom of the embankment to the waiting ambulance. I was grateful to be at a distance. I really don’t know how those folks do it.