Web to the Face

Black and white photo of an orb weaver spider in the middle of its web.

“If I can fool a bug… I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.”
Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

I recently discovered that a surefire way to wake-up in the morning is to pull open the blinds and find myself face to face with an orb weaver spider that used the night time hours to build a web across the kitchen window. There’s nothing like a slight shock to the system to knock the sleep out of your brain.

I have a lot of spiders in the garden: crab spiders, jumping spiders, and orb weavers to name but a few. Those last are the ones I run into most of all. When I say “run into” I mean this fairly literally since, when they are not building webs across windows, they often build them across other gaps, such as between shrubs and trees or the two sides of my arched trellis. Often these webs are built, rather suspiciously, at face level. Apparently their webs are built so as not to be easily seen by their prey. I can attest to this; all it takes is a second of inattention and you have a face full of sticky stuff. Not that I am actually their prey, of course… I think. I suppose one or two may be overly ambitious, but I think they are more likely to be horrified at the loss of an evening’s work as a spluttering, apologetic/cursing human lumbers off into the distance. On the plus side, the spiders often pull down their webs each morning so I like to tell myself that my clumsiness need not be their disaster. Quietly I am amazed at their energy but that’s because I’m the kind of person who won’t go all out on Halloween or Christmas decorations because, you know, you spend hours putting them up and then you have to take them all down again just a few days later. I suspect this makes me un-American.

But all in all, I’m glad to have them around. For one thing, they eat mosquitoes and I’m a fan of any spider that does that.