A marbled orbweaver, aka Halloween spider, is one of the many beasts in the Troy woods. Photo by Dana Wilde
Pretty much the whole family was around the backyard as usual this summer and fall, seen and unseen.
Deer ticks: I've pulled three out of my legs this year, so far. In each case, I never knew it was there until my hand brushed over its backside sticking out of my thigh. Several have run across my hand, too. You can tell a tick from a spider by the gait. Ticks do this tiny plodding. Spiders move with deliberate, sometimes quick, starts and stops.
Yellowjackets: In September, a family built a late nest under the deck railing, right by the front door. My experience is, if you leave yellowjackets alone they'll leave you alone, though my son, Jack, is less confident. One evening we knocked the nest off with a hockey stick.
Dragonflies: There were more dragonflies around this summer than anytime in the last 10-12 years. The yard used to be full of them, angling around the airspace like miniature angels. This summer, as many as 12-15 could be seen on a given afternoon. A weird elongated bug with bulbous eyes that grandson Silas the Animalcatcher found in the brook turned out to be a dragonfly larva. Something exceptionally beautiful about dragonflies in flight. The larvae, not so much.
The dragonflies were probably feasting on gnats, who also seemed to be more numerous in their annoying clouds than recent summers.
Bats catch gnats too, and a few showed up on schedule to their summer digs in the attic. Fewer than last year. Which were fewer than the year before, and so on going back six or seven years. Silas spotted two different bat corpses in the grass during the summer. A Cooperative Extension expert once told me these were probably casualties of starvation.
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Spiders can survive just about anything. There were many thin-legged wolf spiders everywhere outside, as usual. Some larger Schizocosa genus wolf spiders. Several nursery web spiders revealed themselves, one on the kitchen counter, another in the tiger lilies. There were the usual sac spiders around the sink, and a number of parson spiders, which dart around humans fearlessly (and harmlessly). I found a Tmarus crab spider, and Silas found a bright orange Halloween orbweaver (Araneus marmoreus) last week upside down beneath the deck railing. We watched a house spider wrap up an unlucky worm in the same spot in August. The worm put up a desperate fight for quite a while; the spider had to bite it several times to make it still for lunch.
Silas at age 7 has become practically an expert toad, frog, salamander and snake catcher. We drove to my sister's in Farmington one hot day in July where he wanted to explore for toads. "Well," sister Heidi said when we got there, "I'm sorry but I don't think you're going to find anything." In less than five minutes he was holding an enormous toad he found in the bracken off the side of her driveway.
Every time he visited my house, at least one good-sized toad spent several hours of its life in a 5-gallon bucket. By September he was catching two or three green frogs too, sometimes wood frogs or pickerel frogs. Which meant every Saturday or Sunday afternoon there was a brief discussion about whether to keep any of them for pets. In almost all the cases, it turned out to be not a very good idea, and everybody went home to the brook or the woods.
He caught three garter snakes, a red-bellied snake, a green snake, a painted turtle, a slew of crayfish, numerous two-lined and dusky salamanders, and one spotted salamander, a cool find. For some reason he calls the dusky salamanders "yooduskis." "Poppop, I caught another yooduski." I tell him it sounds like he's talking about a city in Ohio. But he likes the sound of it.
Deer came through frequently at night, their sharp hoofs leaving holes and divots in the moss beds.
One afternoon I got out of the car, saw something brown and furry lying near the wild rose hedge and went to look. When I leaned over and recognized it was a weasel, it suddenly lifted its head and opened its mouth to threaten me with its huge, danger-thin incisors. I jumped back, startled. But the weasel was badly injured and couldn't get up. I wondered if a hawk had grabbed it and it got free in the air and fell. No evidence of that, just a thought. When I checked on it later, it had died. The next morning, the body was gone. A scavenger got it no doubt, a skunk, raccoon or coyote, or a crow or even, it turns out, possibly an owl.
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The coyotes howl at night, sometimes very close. Something ancient and mysterious about that sound. Barred owls, the different calls of young and old. Cicadas in the treetops. Crows cawing and ravens screaming. Blue jays' many vocalizations, from scolding to purring, to one afternoon imitating the cries of the cat, Brian.
The chipmunks, mice, and red and gray squirrels have been bolder the last few summers, as Brian's years caught up with him. He declined more rapidly this summer, and passed away the first of October, a few days after his 17th birthday. He was a good friend. A close relative, really.
They're all our relatives.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at [email protected]. His book "Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods" is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
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