Image: An orb weaver spider on my front entryway on November 26, 2024.
You know that feeling when you have a hair in your mouth, that you cannot see, but can definitely feel? How you scrape your tongue, again and again, but nothing seems to move that damn hair? How you are then standing around pursing your lips, trying to catch the hair with your teeth and spitting on the ground like it's the first time you tried chewing tobacco?
Well, I finally figured out what's worse. It is when you walk across your porch, and you feel that strand of spiderweb across your face. The kind of web that is so fine that you never saw it, but on your face, it feels as thick as a piece of twine. Your heart rate spikes like you're in the middle of a stress test and your entire body shakes like a wet dog. You hate that you start slapping at your face as if an egg sack of spiders just hatched on you, but you cannot help yourself. It is not even a conscious thought - your entire body is sure that at least one spider--probably more!--is crawling on your head right now. Definitely worse than a hair in your mouth (except at a restaurant, where you are left wondering if it belongs to the server or the chef.)
That's a picture of the culprit. That spider was at least two inches long and still alive in late November.
Our front door is in a little stone entry way with an arch opening and every year an orb weaver or two take up residence in the arch and leave us intricate presents every morning. The webs tend to stretch all across the five-foot opening, and usually come two or three feet down below the top of the arch. They have rarely been true circles, like you see in photos, but often are a mix of two or three smaller circular webs joined together. They are also very visible. You tend not to walk through them because they are so easily seen.
This year I thought we did not have any orb weavers in residence. I rarely saw anything resembling a web, just occasional single strands running across the opening like the one I walked through the other day. I'm still not sure if this spider is lazy or just damn efficient. Judging from the size of the spider, it has not gone hungry this summer. It is as large or larger than the others I have seen over the years, so the single strand theory of web building must have paid off.
That still doesn't make pushing your face through the web a pleasant experience.
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