The rain continues, although somehow it didn't feel as wet as yesterday, it certainly wasn't as cold. Nonetheless, the mums who came with the afternoon group, huddled together under their brollies as their kids and I hunted for bugs.Because of the inclement weather, not leaving anything to chance, we showed them a real spider and asked them to tell us whether it was a boy or a girl.
'How do you think you might be able to tell?' I asked,
'If it's a girl, it doesn't have eyebrows,' said one boy. My work is done.
But yes, getting back to the spider. A colleague had found a false widow in the storage hut. Portacabin. You know the type of thing. I was sure that false widow spiders were dangerous, not in the league of black widows, but well...
We put her in a jar, for yea verily, she had no eyebrows.
Then we worried about starvation, so we caught a couple of flies, well, Jo did, and fed them into the jar also. The spider ignored them. Jo found a woodlouse and introduced that.
'Nothing eats them,' said I. And nothing did.
This morning, Jo found a big, fat, orb-weaver spider, again, no eyebrows, and put it into the jar. By the afternoon, the widow had speared the orb-weaver, spun it in silk and the poor bugger was beginning to necrotise. For some reason, this horrified us both. Nature is all very well until it gets a little...too natural.
Ah well, nature is red in tooth and claw. But humanity is bloody shocking.
Melissa Etheridge on Prop 8.
"Anyways, she (Etheridge's wife) and I are not allowed the same right under the state constitution as any other citizen. Okay, so I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen. I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books…."
But read her full, totally reasonable and very eloquent comments for yourself.
3 comments:
Crisp-e wanted to feed one of my smaller Shelob's to the big one. I had to draw the line.
Caterpillars are fine but other spiders.... Just wrong.
Melissa is spot on!
That's a very nice photo.
The pacific northwest looks the same from every angle.We had a blustry couple of days here. It was warm yesterday with just a few sprinkles.
Did you know that the pacific northwest map includes a portion of Montana and Idaho?
http://www.gonorthwest.com/Visitor/about/map_attractions.htm
Sleepy - Yes, and I realised the way I wrote it made it look like that, but Jo had put the second spider in because she thought the kids could see the pedipalps well and it never occurred to either of us that one would eat the other. Duh us. Not like it's our job or anything ;)
Kat - I actually didn't know that! My inner pacific northwest map includes us, parts of Washington (yes, only parts, the bits that have the recycling facilities even though they're overall quite a progressive State in some ways,) and all of Oregon. When I'm IN Washington and unable to find recycling facilities and looking at all the big trucks, then my inner map just kicks them out so that it's just BC and Oregon.
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