Sorry (not sorry) if you might be a tad arachnophobic, but here’s the thing: I was terrified of spiders as a kid all the way through to some point of being a grown-up. It was after being a grown-up. When I was 23 or 24, I made a boyfriend check and check again regarding the presence he’d reported of a giant wolf spider in the bathroom. “It was THIS BIG!”… and thankfully it got out of there before harm came to it. Whatever you feel as an arachnophobe, I used to feel it too.
And what fixed that? Looking at spiders and learning about them, and having so very few actual bad experiences and spider bites. It’s like every bite when I was a child could have come from a black fly or mosquito (horse flies: the worst!), but just like I was the family scapegoat, I devolved scapegoating onto whatever spider was at hand. Poor things.
The start of this arc of moral development was house-painting as a teenager, when I painted the leg of a daddy long-legs (they escaped my hideous fear), and watched it carefully clean its leg off. That’s when I realized they have troubles of their own. It was the dawn of my waking up.
So now, when I’m on the boat, I have a rule: leave the spiders alone or put them out on the dock. If you encounter one while on the water, then trap it for the trip, and release it at the end.
And in my house, I have a rule: All rooms can have a resident spider, one per room. Except that I hardly enforce it. I’m really lazy about enforcing it for daddy long-legs, and just keep an eye out for the other, speedier kinds (the pale yellow house spider, unidentified, others). I have to dust for cobwebs a few times a year.
I always put these guys outdoors simply because I think they’ll have an easier time hunting:
If the spider count in a location is too much, I move the spider elsewhere. Usually outdoors if the weather is ok, but in winter, I move them to the garage or the cold cellar.
Windowsill Sentinel spiders
I tend to leave the screen off my kitchen and bathroom windows, so occasionally, I get a resident window-sill spider. These are speedy little predators who are very shy around people. Mostly. They tend to be more outgoing at night.
Back in 2012 I started this blog post about my Kitchen Spider who, of course, I named Charlotte. Here she is, in the kind of photograph I had of that time:
Charlotte’s web had a collection of prey (visible), but also its previous moult exoskeleton (out of frame). I was really quite surprised how small she was when she started out — she was a very tiny spider.
You’ll see that there’s greater clarity in a circle around the spider. This is the funnel of the web. Charlotte was a very subdued presence on the window sill, hanging out at the mouth of her cave but retreating whenever I startled her. When she was bold enough to come out of her cave, her leg span was that of a 25¢ piece.
Soon, after more than a week without prey, her web wound around the frame of the window and various objects, and she even got off the window sill and wrapped a new web around the — I kid you not — handle of the kitchen faucet. I’m mentioning this because another kitchen spider does the same thing!
The first morning I just removed the web, but on the second morning, I felt a little sorry for her because the energy expenditure to do that work must mean she was hungry. I left the web intact, and just handled the faucet when I needed to use it. Eventually
Here’s a gallery:
Upstairs, this year, I had a gregarious spider who even allowed a friend of the same type to hang out for a couple of days (I had to rescue it out of the bath and put it out the window). Here’s the fabulous expanse of its web:
This kind of spider is called a Barn funnel spider in North America and a Domestic house spider in Europe; they look much scarier than they actually are – they are shy, opt to flee, and if they bite, they don’t even break the skin. I still get the squeamish “don’t touch me!” feeling when I get close to one, but knowing these things about them, I leave them in peace.
I even try to not disturb them in the garden, where I have to look for the funnel webs they create between plant leaves and other objects. This lucky spider, here, set up shop on my potting table. It even managed to drown itself in the potting sink during a rain. I placed its body back in the funnel web, and two days later, it was back as if resurrection was no big deal.
The orb-weaver spider
These guys are my second-favourite spider. From September until the frost comes, I won’t cross any area they’ve cordoned off with one of their webs. Including the patio door, which means I have to go downstairs to go out the back door.
The orb-weaver typically weaves a web between plants in meadows. Because it’s so energetically costly to weave a web, I’ve noticed that if one gets torn down by Big Clumsy (me, another animal, a bird), the spider rebuilds it with a zig-zag pattern. They will also consume their web and built it anew overnight, if it calls for it. I read once on the BBC website about bird-safe glass inspired by orb-weaver webs: apparently the silk contains proteins that show up in UV light so that birds don’t fly through in pursuit of insects.
And I even found a gravid spider (one that’s ready to lay eggs) hiding in the curl of a sunflower leaf:
My favourite: jumping spiders!
On Jim
Check out this super-cute (even if old) video of a curious jumping spider! And Instagram has plenty to help you get over your arachnophobia. It’s safe.
These spiders are everywhere, perfectly harmless, and at times they are perfectly helpless. I accidentally killed one while cleaning the bay window shelf, and I felt terrible about it. I’ll forever be more attentive than I was that day, as that’s one place they could make a permanent home.
