The Daily Bucket is a place to catch your casual observations of the natural world and turn them into a valuable resource. Whether it's the first flowers of spring or that odd bug in your basement, don't be afraid to toss your thoughts into the bucket. Check here for a more complete description.
Seattle, December 29, 2011.
From one of my comments, December 19.
The 6-legged Cross-Spider that has been living in the downstairs bathroom window since early summer is hanging on. She's still tending her web, though more slowly now. I continue to clean frass off of the window-sill below her, but haven't had the heart to disturb her with any window cleaning. Her window remains filthy. Our Christmas guests can just deal with it.
Sometime over the holidays someone cleaned her window. I found her a couple of mornings ago, still alive, hunkered into an upper corner of the window frame with no web to support her. There was no frass on the windowsill. This evening she's ventured as far as the corner of the glass, caught up in a clotted fragment of web, just enough to cradle her in the air. Not enough, I suspect, to catch any of the late houseflies or ladybugs that might provide her sustenance. Two new lines tether her to the window frame. Another leads to a rough hideyhole in a corner.
I don't know much about spider life cycles. My field notes mention a single active web down at the restored wetland on November 8, just before the first real frost, but I've seen none since then in any of my regular outdoor haunts. I suspect that those spiders have completed their yearly work; have laid their eggs and died or gone into deep cover for the winter. The bathroom spider somehow found a far more protected place to carry on her business. Now she lingers, still plump, but fading. I wonder if her protected place was too protected, if it hid her from the amorous advances of a male of her kind, if she has eggs to lay or if she will just drift in some kind of suspended spider dream state until she exhausts her stores of easy summer prey and leaves her spent body curled up on the windowsill for us to find some morning.
December 29, 2011. One Cross Spider still lingers in the bathroom window.
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I've not forgotten about the 2012 Yardbird Race. Look for an official announcement on New Year's Eve and start counting at midnight January 1 your time. We'll start reporting on New Year's Day.
There was a Matching Mole sighting here in Seattle yesterday. He's working his way from British Columbia to Florida and we got together for some birding yesterday afternoon during a long layover. Say hi to him - he'll be jet-lagged.
So, where are you and what's happening there? I'll be in and out starting about 1pm PST.