We have The Manatee over as a guest this week and have thus been busy doing things other than chasing critters, but I have to give him credit for finding this one, immediately upon my commenting that I needed to try and find something. Our first view comes from inside, looking out, early in the morning:
For reasons unknown, one window of Stately Walkabout Manor has been overtaken by several webs of funnel-weaver spider (Agelenidae,) and in one such web was sprawled this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis,) looking like I’d caught it in mid-fall. This was early in the morning when the night had been pretty cool, and the sun wasn’t hitting the window yet, so I wasn’t sure if the anole had somehow gotten caught in the web or simply chosen it as a hammock to snooze within the previous night. From the outside, it was much higher, and so I took a stepstool with me when I went out there.
I liked capturing the multiple reflections off of the double-paned glass, and we can see here that the anole is awake. The various funnel-weaver spiders in the US, unlike the funnel-web spiders of Australia, have ‘medically insignificant’ venom and so they’re not dangerous to people, though I cannot vouch for how their venom might affect an anole – or whether they’d even consider biting one rather than hiding in the tunnel attached to their web, the typical protective response. The anole’s position looks awkward, but this really isn’t any indication, since they can sleep in some pretty odd positions.
Once on the stepstool, I was a lot closer and could see things better, but still couldn’t determine if the anole was caught in any way. My proximity wasn’t enough to send it scurrying for cover however, and it wasn’t until I reached up and began trying to scoop it from the web that the anole panicked and fought itself free, dropping from the web to the windowsill – I’ve watched them perform similar and greater drops to no harm, since they weigh very little and absorb the impact with their legs and belly. This one scampered off and disappeared through a gap in the deck boards, so I remain unsure if the anole really intended to sleep that way or not. Either way, you have to appreciate the dynamic pose of that first silhouette.