Wondering

A few days ago I spotted what, at first, I thought was a piece of polystyrene stuck on my fence.
A close look showed it to be a cocoon of some sort:



I was wondering whether the owner was also the owner of this orb web which is very close by:



I will have to keep my eye open for any spiderlings.

Friday at the Flicks - House Sparrows & Stretch Spiders

One particularly hot day many of the local House Sparrows spent a lazy time Sunbathing on my shed roof. Who says their numbers are in decline? Here they have been breeding well this year:




I have tried several time to video the Stretch Spiders which build their webs between the plants in my garden pond. They seem to re-build them every day, if not more than once a day. This is the best I have managed so far. The webs are large and they work so quickly it isn't easy to try getting in really close:



Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

Jewels on the Web

Another cold start to the day. Once again the temperature first thing this morning was -3C but this time with foggy conditions. Most things were covered in frost:

 

While we were out walk-about I noticed how well some spiders' webs were showing as the dew drops on them had frozen:

 

 


A couple of attempts at taking macro shots, hand held so not the clearest of photos:





The light refracting through the frozen water drops made them look as though each spider had scattered jewels along the strands of its web.

European Garden Spider

Spotted a very large orb web in the garden strung between two uprights which are 68 inches (1730mm) apart. It is amazing the effort a spider has to go to in bridging the gap with the first couple of connections before it can start building the web. This usually has to be done every day / night as the web soon becomes damaged by clumsy humans walking through it!

The question that springs to my mind is - when the spider first uses those two uprights and having made its first anchor point on one upright, has it already chosen the second upright or does it come across it accidentally?

Getting the web and spider in focus was problematic as, with such a large span, the slightest breeze was making the whole thing move quite a distance.

This wider view was given a pseudo HDR treatment to make the web strands stand out better.




The owner - a European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus)
Probably the most common spider in Europe





This individual was about an inch (24mm) across the outstretched legs.

Dusty Sparrows and Sheets of Silk

As we were returning from a gentle walk round the cricket field I saw the usual group of House Sparrows having a good old bathe in the dust.



With the Lumix TZ7 I was able to get the above still shot and the following hand held video.



It had been a misty night and there was plenty of dew on the hedges this morning. On one particular hedge was a line of sheet webs. A type I had never really noticed before.





I wonder how long it takes a spider to construct these webs as they seem to have a lot more silk in their construction than in an orb web. A criss cross of single threads can be seen above the web. The idea being that a flying insect will bump into a thread and be knocked down to land in the sheet web. Fascinating how many different ways various species of spider have developed to catch their prey.

The Spider and the Ladybird

While I was wandering round my pond with camera in hand hoping to spot a dragonfly I had seen earlier I spied a ladybird flying across the pond. I was pondering the possibility of taking a photo of it in flight when it suddenly came to a halt, caught up in one of the many spider webs.

I watched for a while to see if it would break free while the spider sat patiently in the middle of its web. There was no escape as the ladybird was stuck fast and the spider eventually approached its prey very cautiously. Once the spider was next to the ladybird it attached many silk threads and used its legs to spin it round at quite a fast rate, all the time encapsulating the ladybird in a silk cocoon. When the spider was satisfied that its next meal was going nowhere it ambled back to the centre of the web.

At one stage I contemplated fetching the camcorder to show how deftly the spider could spin its prey round but that would have meant missing most of the action so I made do with a series of still shots. I was surprised how many threads the spider was producing at once. One of the photos, unfortunately not in focus, showed about ten threads all being spun at the same time.



Not the nicest of things I have photographed but then nature isn't always nice and cuddly and all creatures have to eat.