So. The Spiders.

Seamus Heaney’s masterful translation of Beowulf launches the epic thus: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by… Makes you think you’re around a fire, about to hear a jolly good yarn, and yes, you get one.

So, the spiders. We have spiders here, in Davis, lots of spiders. Spiders that spin webs everywhere, even in places you’d think a spider could never get.

Mostly they’re the long-legged, tiny-bodied “daddy long-legs” which Numenius tells me are harvestmen and technically not spiders, but we’re going to ignore that for now. They are fierce fly hunters and occasionally they eat each other. They are very tolerated by us until I have fit of cleaning up where they are the first casualties.

Garden spiders in the garden or yard, or more like woodpile, where they are fodder for the house wren or wintering rock wren.

The spiders that everyone thinks of when they think of California, though, are the black widows, the shiny black spiders with a red hourglass warning sign on the belly. They can hurt you worse than a rattlesnake.

Black widows are easy to tell even if you can’t see them because their untidy yet contained webs have a single, verticle strand that leads to another untidy, contained web below. They are most active on hot summer evenings.

Lactrodectus species have the stickiest of all spider webs and are surely the inspiration for the sticky cobwebs on funfair ghost trains.

We leave them alone, too, as long as they don’t decide to move inside. By the fire. To listen to the stories.

This is an Ecotone entry for Spiders and Place.