Sometimes when I’m birdwatching…
Some clicking around on Bugguide.net leads me to think this is Ctenucha brunnea, a species of tiger moth. A bunch of them were fluttering next to the Baron Ranch Trail yesterday.
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If you’ve known me for two seconds, you know I love, L O V E jumping spiders. They’re the cutest little things and so attentive. I love to watch them watching me, you can see them actively trying to figure things out. This little dude is a Phidippus audax, or Bold Jumping Spider. I’ve named it Sprite :D.
I’ve already enjoyed the heck out of watching it get around. Seriously, if you get a chance to watch a jumping spider, give it a shot, they’re entertaining little buggers. In this photo, it was leaning down to watch my fingers as they stabilized my camera on the countertop :).
In reference to the person who asked yesterday, another huge difference between P. audax and P. regius is size. P. regius easily dwarfs P. audax, with P. regius being the largest species of jumper in the Eastern US. It can still be difficult to tell them apart when they’re still tiny little slings, though. As the name implies, what these guys lack in size, they make up for in personality.
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The Beauty of Moths is Captured Under a High Resolution Scanner by Jim des Rivieres
Since 2002 photographer Jim des Rivieres has worked with a series of images of moths and butterflies local to the Ottawa area, photographed with a high-resolution flatbed camera.
Impressively real, the artist’s prints have a 3D quality, which demand attention. The texture and every fine detail of the insects is seen under the black background. Its delicate antennas, bodies and perfectly symmetrical wings are exposed for inspection. Featuring moths such as the Luna Moth and the Virgin Tiger moth among many others, he captures the obscure beauty of one of nature’s most dainty and ephemeral creatures.
Rarely seen by the average person in such detail, Des Rivieres gives us access to their sublime beauty. You can find the high-resolution photographs in his Etsy shop.
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The wizardly way to deal with this is to chat with spiders until they no longer frighten you. :)
They are not the world’s most voluble conversationalists. Mostly what they have to say is “Hungry”, “gotta make a web”, “gotta hang out in the web”, “OH WOW I CAUGHT SOMETHING YAY!”, “Sorry, can’t talk, gotta wrap up what I caught”, “Mmmmm” (at dinnertime), “gotta take the web down and conserve my resources”, and (seasonally) “HEY PRETTY LADY / PRETTY GUY, LET’S DANCE / FUCK”.
But if you can get them past that — usually by persistence: wizards who specialize in insects learn persistence pretty early on — you will also hear “Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, you looked kinda like a tree from that angle”, “Oh come on, the wind blew me into your hair, do you think I wanted to be here? You are not remotely edible”, “You wouldn’t have a caterpillar on you, would you? I missed lunch”, “How do you get by with so few legs? I am so sorry for you”, “I am so not ready for sex yet”, and “Would you turn off that damn light?”, or alternately “Thank you for leaving the porch light on last night, best meal I’ve had in ages, I asked all my mates round and everybody made out like bandits.”
…Wizards aside, I once had a conversation rather like this with a driveway full of tarantulas (they would come out and bask on cool mornings because the driveway would store the sun’s heat overnight). The brown tarantula, early in the morning before things warm up enough for them to get active, is the most docile and sociable of creatures. They sit there and look at you with all their little eyes. You look at them with your two. Peaceful coexistence, until they start quietly creeping away to hide in the bushes.
(I also had a long talk some years ago with the giant Malaysian hissing cockroach up at the Museum of Natural History in NY, but I can’t discuss that because it was mostly about sex.)
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