Happy Birthday to my beloved granddaughter, 3 today. She went to the zoo, I've seen the pictures, though I'm not quite sure how her daddy managed to be there! I had to phone and leave a message at 8 this morning. But I'll be seeing her in five days' time!The last couple of days, people have been bringing us in spiders to identify. Red ones, red and black ones, furry ones. In my entire life I never thought I would be involved in identifying spiders, I used to get the screaming habdabs when confronted with quite innocuous ones as a young whippersnapper.
I felt full of my own importance peering at a little reddish brown corpse through a big old Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and carefully measuring the cephalathorax. I didn't manage to find out what it was of course, but I did venture a moderately informed opinion on what it wasn't.
It is bizarre that people will go into the nearest public facility with their questions.
A friend who works at the Firehall told me that a couple of weeks ago a man just wandered in and asked some medical question, the type you'd normally ask your pharmacist about. The fire chief told the guy to do just that.
Kris told me that a couple of years back, a member of the public came into the Nature House with a taped up box. They wanted her to identify the snakes in the box.
'Where d'you find them?' she asked,
'On a truck,'
'Right....do you know where the truck came in from?'
'Not sure, the States somewhere, maybe Texas....'
'So......do you think it might contain some of the most deadly rattlesnakes in North America?'
'Don't know..'
'Well there's no way that box is being opened in this facility...'
Another thing that has happened the last couple of days is that I have been at work until 19.30. Yeah, quite reminds me of days at Mayhem. Except that I would have had plenty of time to do the work during my normal day, just that I've had to wait for the President of the Nature Park Society to come over from her day job to help me fill in a Grant Application.
Tonight we all but finished it. And designed a Halloween House.
3 comments:
I do have to wonder just how many spiders around here have to be identified. If if isn't black with a red spot on the belly (thus should belong 300 miles from here) or the very rare brown thing that is called "recluse" (belonging 2000 miles away) which would never know to recognise...who cares????
spider = household pest. Better than any mosquito, ant or fly any day no matter how gross they are. Yes, I admit I used to throw shoes at wolf spiders. Sneaky buggers, but harmless.
Well now, since you ask....the first one was a Boreal jumping spider, and they do look a bit scary, red, black and furry, good horror movie material. The one yesterday may be a false widow, tho I don't think so from the lit we have and even then, a false widow can give a necrotising bite apparently.
I think the fear is that spiders that should live a long way away are being seen further north.
False Widows have been found in Hampshire.
Crisp-e had one in his garden but I'm not sure if there was a precise ID on it.
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