Tag Archives: wildlife

My Life With Spiders

Caught In Charlotte’s Web

It is still too dark to check on her.

Last night, I watched helplessly as she rushed to bundle up her home in the failing light, as rain lashed down and the wind blew. She hadn’t quite succeeded by the time I closed the blinds, but she was huddled up in a relatively safe and protected spot.

As dawn finally breaks over the eastern ridge, I hazard a peek through the blinds. Her home is immaculate, and she is perched comfortably in the center, her head down and waiting. I see the beginning haze of a cloud of gnats rising from the stinking laurel shrub below, and I am relieved that she will not go hungry today.

I call her Charlotte, for the obvious reason that she is an orb weaver spider, and I was one of the many children in this world who cried over E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Her home is a web that she has spun across the outside of my dining room window, mere feet from where I sit and write most days.

Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is aptly named “spider season” by the locals.

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Mad for Mould

A love letter to an unsung garden hero

Winter brings with it a green carpet. The November rains return in earnest to tell us winter is on her way. The grasses, dry and brown from summer heat, come alive in the cool dampness. Moss creeps over bare earth, ensuring every footstep is cushioned by emeralds.

Along with the green comes the leaves, tumbling down to land like jewels upon the lawn. Yellow, red, orange, and tawny brown compete for pride of place. Those leaves that still cling to skeletal branches stand out beautifully against the cold, grey skies. It is like a treasure has been spilt upon the ground from the benevolent heavens above.

In fact, it is the lawns and not the streets that are paved in gold. For the gardener, each leaf is more valuable than one would dare imagine.

It is my task on this late November day to collect the leaves.

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Taking the Time to Live a Longer Life

Musings from the bus stop.

The journey begins pleasantly enough. I walk down the lane, leaves crunching underfoot. First I crunch through a collection of maple leaves which are satisfyingly crispy even after yesterday’s drizzle.

Next, my feet wade into a sea of yellow heart-shaped leaves. It is the cottonwoods, whose pleasant fragrance reaches me before I see the first impossibly tall trunk. Looking up, I realize our lane winds through a copse of these giant grandmother cottonwoods. Large and wise they tower above. I have driven this lane a thousand times and never noticed them dancing alongside the pavement, ensconced as I was in an aluminum, plastic, and steel cage.

I am disappointed in myself, but also thrilled to have finally made their discovery.

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On Wings of Death, Comes Life

The promise of the owl

It is not the sound that draws my eyes heavenward, for there is no sound.

It is not movement, for in the gloaming, movement is almost as invisible as the silence.

No, it is something more primal, more visceral, more animal in nature. It is the caution of prey that draws my eyes upward, bred deeply into my human animal psyche from a time when our rodent-like ancestors cowered in burrows, hiding from that which would destroy.

Dark wings blot out the pale moon-lit sky, all the more terrifying for the soundless silence screaming out.

Predator. Harbinger. Guide.

The barred owl alights on a nearby post, eyes like all-seeing saucers reading into my soul. 

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The Day I Spared Peter Rabbit

Beneath dead earth new life arises

Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash

I was wading knee deep through the fallen soldiers in a wasteland of death. The skeletal remains of heather, a sword fern, and countless other shrubs and perennials that could no longer be identified crunched underfoot.

Someone, in the not-too-distant past, had tried to eradicate a horsetail problem by dousing the entire garden border with a broad-spectrum herbicide. The only living things that remained were the prehistoric green fronds of the horsetails themselves.

I levered my spade underneath one of the heather remains and pushed it upward. A frantic squeaking accompanied the severing of the plant’s roots. I quickly stepped back and surveyed the scene before me.

With the heather gone, I could clearly see a small burrow with a lining of soft brown and white fur sticking out.

Oh no. Bunny nest.

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