Just clearing out a couple more photos from the backlog where I can. These were from the other night, while I was poking around with the headlamp, as is my wont. I’m quite used to seeing the bright blue ‘stars’ from the lawn that signify spider eyes reflecting the light, but the location of this one drew me in closer, since it was on the wall of the house. The odd appearance of her abdomen convinced me that photos were in order, though.
That’s a wolf spider, genus Lycosidae but I’m not attempting to get any more specific than that, with her brood of newborns on her abdomen. This is common for the genus, which carries its egg sac around until they hatch out, and then carries the young for a bit, also preparing food for them. Other species hang the egg sac in a web or within a nursery protected by walls of webbing until the young are able to scamper away on their own, typically a few days to maybe two weeks.
This one knew I was nearby, and I touched her leg to try and get her to turn for a more direct profile shot, which prompted her to start moving off. After only a few steps, however, she missed her footing and fell about 20cm to the ground, where the appearance changed a bit.
While many remained on her abdomen, a lot of the babies had bounced off and were scattered around in in all directions. While editing this photo, I realized she was missing a leg and wondered if she’d lost it in the fall, but no, it’s missing in the original shots too, and might be what caused her to fall. I have no idea how well spiders compensate for missing limbs – it happens a lot – or whether it even registers on them. Do they still attempt to wind prey with webbing manipulated by legs that aren’t there, failing miserably? I’ll have to observe a bit closer. Meanwhile, I highlighted all of the bebbies I could find in the original image to show how far they’d bounced.
I didn’t do the remaining brood on her back, though I did mark one on her leg, and who knows how many I couldn’t spot in the debris? I know I came back a few minutes later, and she hadn’t moved while the area surrounding her still sparkled with the eyes of the young that had not climbed back aboard.
Meanwhile, there’s been a bird soaring over the property just about every day, usually seen when the camera isn’t in hand, but just once I was able to fire off a few frames as it passed, unfortunately without compensation for the cloudy sky, so almost entirely silhouetted.
No calls have ever been heard, and the scale is difficult to judge but I got the impression of a smallish raptor, perhaps about crow-sized. It generally soars without flapping, wheeling in large circles like a vulture, but faster and more adept. I took this frame and tweaked the levels to bring out what details I could:
That’s enough to reveal a small marking through the eye, but nothing else evident, and my belief is that, if it were white, it should look brighter than this, so I’m leaning towards it being a uniform grey. With that, the shape, and the small hooked beak, the only thing that I found that appears to match is a Mississippi kite (Ictinia mississippiensis.) The Cornell site doesn’t show them living in this area, though the Sibley guide indicates occasional sightings. I know when I first spotted it, it appeared to have a slightly notched tail, which didn’t match the various photos and outlines that I’d found, but if you watch the second video in this gallery closely (the one in flight against the sky,) you can see that occasionally, the tail closes down and it gets a notched appearance – the Cornell site also remarks upon this. So this is a tentative identification for now, pending better shots and perhaps some audio clues. We’ll see what happens.
This is a good place to say that tomorrow is World Migratory Bird Day, so I already have one goal set for that, and I encourage everyone to pursue their own.