In his poem “Why I Became an Earth Dweller,” Kim Stafford gives a lot of reasons, each beginning with “because.” Today, I like this one:
Because dawn spiderwebs
across my path meant no one was there before me.
On a walk through the garden, I blundered through several. One, made by a Joro spider, was like a clothesline across the throat.
If you think like a biologist, rather than as a poet, you think that now’s the time to conduct a survey of spider populations.
The Joros I’ve been watching, like many other spiders, build webs all year long. But the big webs appear in the fall.
It’s just part of the lifecycle. These spiders overwinter as eggs. They hatch in the spring, and their early webs are child’s play. The spiders mature in summer. In the fall, you don’t have to work to see — or feel — the artists’ mature work. One of the spans in the garden was more than 20 feet. I don’t have any idea how that’s done.
I’ve seen holes in these webs — about the size of a baseball — and had thought that some bird, like me, had blundered through.
But Robert W. Pemberton of Atlanta has reported seeing cardinals feeding on Joros. He confirmed those observations by tethering spiders and recording the results. Those cardinals at your feeder love the seeds, but they are omnivores.
• Sources and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024, p. 33.
Robert W. Pemberton, “Cardinal predation of the invasive JorÅ spider Trichophila clavata (Araneae: Nephilidae) in Georgia”; Florida Entomological Society, Jan. 17, 2025. It’s here:
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