Garden Beauties

After we got a bunch of rain last week, the exterior of our house exploded with huge, absolutely gorgeous spiders building these incredible webs. It's actually hard to walk around outside without running into webs! Appropriate for October, no? Yesterday when I had a spare moment I grabbed my camera and took some shots.

My first discovery was that these spiders are shy! The orange beauty pictured above was dead center in her web, but the moment I approached she scurried up to take cover under the leaf at the top.

 I have no idea what kind of spiders these are, although the generic is I think "orb-weaver." Although the type in our yard are all the same shape, they come in a variety of colors and patterns, from brown and white to brilliant orange and yellow.

 Their webs are huge! I'd say we had 15 or more in our front yard, most of them on a single bush. They seem to be building right now all over El Cerrito, but a couple of people have actually stopped to admire the profusion in our bush.

I'm not great at photography, so getting these close up shots involved me attempting to trick my camera's "automatic" mode into focusing the right way. It probably wasn't the best way to go about the matter, but it actually did "teach" me how to find the right lighting. If I didn't get it right, the camera would focus on whatever was beyond the web and the spider would turn out as a big blurry dot.

 The photo below, which Blogger is for some reason turning sideways, is really cool if you can see what it is. The spider is in the center of the web wrapping up one yellow jacket, while a second snack has already been neatly stored in the bottom right corner. Nice!

 Here's a close-up of the snack...

 The spider below was my favorite. She was an absolutely gorgeous orange.

 The up-close-and-personal shot I got of her took forever, and, in my opinion, is the absolute best:

I may have to get that one printed out to hang somewhere. As for the industrious lady below, she anchored half of her web on our wind chimes. I've been watching her for a few days because this has been a challenge. Her first web was destroyed as soon as the wind came and blew the chimes.

The second time around, she wrapped the chimes in webbing to keep them stabilized. It's paid off, I think; she now has the perfect spot to retreat from danger. And look at those markings! How cool is that?

It's good I grabbed the camera when I did. Beowulf and I went out this afternoon to check on the spiders and about half of those I photographed have up and gone - webs dismantled and vanished as if they were never there. There were also some newcomers, though, so I'm hoping the bulk of them will stick around until Halloween.