A walk in the woods

For our final photo walk, Riekie and I (see previous posts here and here) and Rosie (the dog) went for a walk through a nearby forestry plantation. The day had started off pretty dismal – cold and raining – but it cleared around 9 a.m. and we were then able to go out. Our walk […]

Stung by a wasp update

I thought that the wasp in the first Stung by a wasp installment, had already been killed but the truth is far, far worse. It’s like something out of a horror movie! According to Wikipedia: Spider wasps are long-legged, solitary wasps that use a single spider as a host for feeding their larvae. They paralyze […]

Stung by a wasp

No, thankfully not me, but the unfortunate rain spider below. My roving reporter a.k.a. Willie, came across this when he was out mountain biking on a nearby forestry road the other day. By the time he saw it, the wasp had already killed the spider and was dragging it off. [The photo was taken with […]

A correction and a question

Initially Joan Failo (from The Spider Club) had identified the spider skin in my previous posts Spider Skeleton I and Spider Skeleton II as being that of a female rain spider. On inspection of the close-up photos I took yesterday, she now thinks it may be a male rain spider skin. Which brings me to […]

Spider skeleton II

Yes folks, today we continue the exciting saga of the spider skeleton . . . If you missed episode one you can read it here. Clouded Marble left a comment on the last installment asking whether it was maybe a “real” dead spider and not just the skin left behind after moulting. Being a scientist, […]

Spider skeleton I

On Saturday morning I was coming back from a walk with the dog, when I noticed something interesting near our driveway. Of course, I just had to go inside and get a camera! As I stood there leaning over the flowerbed, apparently taking a photograph of a brick wall, a car stopped close by. I […]

A short story of two White-eyes and a spider

A couple of days ago I was standing on our deck in the late afternoon, watching the sun go down. I saw something fluttering near the garden wall. Hoping that it was the sunbirds I’d been trying to get photos of, I rushed inside to get a camera. It wasn’t the sunbirds after all, but […]

More notes on venom

A comment by David Robertson on one of my recent posts, reminded me of a passage from one of my favourite books: Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams.  If you missed my previous post on this book click here. I think everybody should read this book at least once! It’s educational and it’s funny. […]

What happens if you obsess about something just before Christmas?

Well, if you’re me and you’ve been obsessing about spiders, spider webs, spider identification and spider photography (and not just on your blog!), you get these as Christmas gifts: Wonderful! How did you guess this is something that I wanted, and more importantly needed?! 😉 So in case you can’t see in the photos, I […]

Pitfalls in spider identification

So I’ve found another thing I’m not particularly good at . . . spider identification. And, since we have 2000 plus species in South Africa, I’m not even trying to identify down to species level. Species identification was never my strong suit. Not birds (at least not the ones that fall into the Big/Little Brown […]