Spiders - March 2003

This is the second chapter in the life of the spiders living in my backyard.

All but one of the spiders has disappeared. We have had the first autumn rains combined with a brief cool spell. During this time none of the spiders made webs, completely disappeared. I had thought their season over. However the weather has warmed up again and we have had some near 30c days over the past week or so and Big Red has returned - with a guest.

I came home from a late night outing to find this guy hanging off the same web as Big Red. Big Red was sitting in the middle of her (now I believe it is a 'her', had my suspicions in any case) web as normal except on the other side of the web. Unfortunately I was unable to get a photo of him from the other side due to the way the web was constructed and the fact that I still don't like getting too close. I did see him one other time afterwards, but haven't seen him since. I also took some more photos of Big Red as I wanted to compare them to the ones I had taken a month before.

February 2003	March 2003

Although the second photo is definitely not as good as the first, it can be clearly seen that she has gained weight. Either she has been eating well, or there has been some hanky panky in my backyard.