As well as taking endless photographs of flowers over here, I’ve also had the opportunity to capture some wee beasties, mostly spiders and their unwilling companions. The fellow on the right, however, is actually a snail up close. It turns out that the house in Wivenhoe was host to quite the army of snails, which would come out at night and (literally) crawl all over the house. No idea what they were searching for, but it was pretty weird to come back at night after a session of internet in the office to find them all over the front window of the sitting room.
The Wivenhoe house was also home (right at the end of our stay there) to this nifty spider. One evening I just noticed it hanging there near the ceiling in the kitchen, so I of course took a ton of pictures of it. (Conveniently, it just sat there posing through the entire session.) It disappeared a day or two later, but WeatherGirl found that it had moved (for inscrutably arachnid reasons) over to the front of the clothes washing machine.
Given that I have no real history of photographing spiders, I rather assumed I was done with the whole spidie thing for the moment, but ’twas not to be true. In one of my first walks around our apartment complex, I ran across another spider, with a large, complex web that quite obviously successful at trapping meals. There were several “finished” critters in evidence, and the unfortunate fellow to the right still struggling weakly (and I assume futilely) against its bonds. There was a light breeze, which made it harder to photograph up close than it had been in the kitchen. At one point I accidentally bumped the web, and the spider scurried from its throne in the center of the web up to the top, where it adopted a ball-like post and watched over its domain. Not sure whether it thought I was lunch or a Bad Guy, but it never did come down again while I was there.
In fairness, however, as cool as our monsters have been, they don’t hold a candle to the amazing sightings of Cory and Mrs. Q among their many adventures in these fair isles. They have some really excellent photos from their trip, and a visit is definitely recommended!
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