While it is not Halloween or the season for Pumpkin Spice - which comes earlier every damn year - it is spider web season here in Withering Heights.
When we first moved in, they were all over the outside and inside of this house and its lot. Then they went away and came back in the spring. Then they went away and cam back in last two weeks.
We're not talking bout a cobweb here and there. We are talking jumbo webs. These are the type of spider webs that you see in illustrated children's books.
Webs that take over doorways, outdoor stairs, and the like.
The explanations we have heard are:
a) once they get in and around your house and lay eggs, it takes a while to get them gone, but be persistent, and
b) You bought a house on a deeply wooded lot - what did you expect?
And the spiders? Big juicy orbit spinners. Nothing poisonous, just big and juicy.
Neither Cookie or The Husband hate spiders unless they are poisonous. But we would rather not kill them, as they do important work. On a couple of occasions when we have had to remove the webs, we relocated the spiders to a less confrontational place.
Still, Cookie for one would rather not walk through one of these webs and then launch into a childish panic over getting it off him.
Currently, however, there is a big old spider on the front porch and the postman won't deliver if he has to swat at them on his way to the mailbox.
In other news, Cookie is feeling overwhelmed by the house. We are stuck in a purgatory of hoping to get the remodeling done soon, and not being able to move forward because the builder hasn't gotten our final project updated.
Spider season has started here, too - some of them are now big enough to catch the honeybees (shame, but that's nature for you), but they all have quite a bit of growing yet to do, judging by previous years. It is a pain indeed to go outside for my first fag and a coffee and walk face-first into a beautifully-constructed web, then spend a frustrating few minutes picking the strands out of my hair... Jx
ReplyDeletePS Sorry the "Withering Heights" project's taking so long. That's always frustrating.
When I lived in Moreland Hills for about ten years I was in a wooded area, but spiders were not a particular problem. However, I remember the meadowy area near Shaker and Richmond, and in the fall there were tons of giant spiders and webs. A friend and I collected great numbers of them and kept them in a terrarium at the Middle School--definitely our least-admired project.
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By the way, how do you relocate your spiders? I recall that you can get them to climb on a stick, but they often then make a beeline for your hand. Back then, we used quick reflexes to knock them into a jar, but today I would figure that any area I would take them to would have enough spiders of its own, and I definitely would not put up with large spiders* that scare the mail-person.
--Jim
*In this old post I placed a photo of my huge Halloween spider that frightened the policeman:
https://roadtoparnassus.blogspot.com/2017/10/halloween-on-hemlock-lane.html