spiders

[Tom W.]

I went outside yesterday and saw for the first time in years a beautiful huge garden spider on my back deck. At the time it was munching on a butterfly or moth. Does anyone know for real if they can capture a hummingbird? If I could take the picture off of my phone I'd post it.

[ShooterAZ]

Some spiders in the Amazon Jungle can catch birds, but I doubt if an Alabama Barking Spider could catch a hummingbird.

[Tom W.]

I went outside yesterday and saw for the first time in years a beautiful huge garden spider on my back deck. At the time it was munching on a butterfly or moth. Does anyone know for real if they can capture a hummingbird? If I could take the picture off of my phone I'd post it.

[elmacgyver0]

I haven't seen one of those in decades, used to be a lot of them on the farm when I was a kid.
I liked them a lot and always left them alone.

[Handloader109]

Nah, I've got a couple of dozen h birds swarming and they could get out of any spiderweb made....

Back in MS we had some tremendously large black, yellow garden spiders. Some were hand size.

[Tom W.]

Our hummingbirds have been scarce this year. 50 miles south of here, where I used to live, they are as common as mosquitoes.

[MaryB]

I have black and yellow orb weavers in the garden. One is hand sized(leg spread) and is pretty territorial! Reared up at me when I was picking a tomato next to it! They are harmless and eat a lot of garden pests so I let them be unless I have to remove a web to get to the tomatoes. I was bringing baby ones in the house on the leaf lettuce I grow. As I was washing it they would swim to the top. I would let them crawl onto a finger and take them back outside. I use no chemicals in my garden so I do not kill predators!

[William Yanda]

Tom
Can you email the photo to yourself and go from there?
Bill

[Tom W.]

I've probably forgotten how to post a picture..... the message I get is a failure to upload.

[dagger dog]

Used to catch grasshoppers and toss them into the web watch the spider do it's thing.

[Tom W.]

Last night I turned on the back deck light to attract bus and saw the spider shaking it's web.... maybe to attract more bugs?
I nor my wife will harm this spider.....others I'm not so sure about.

[Echo]

About the only spiders I have are Black widows. I leave them alone, and they leave me alone...

[Wayne Smith]

We have Golden Orb spiders in our garden - and black widows in the woodpile and in my garage. Leave them alone, wear gloves when moving things, and you have no problem. The boys learned to leave them alone, our grandchildren are learning to leave bees alone so they do not sting.

This is our first year for the Golden Orbs. We had them in our garden when I was a child.

[winelover]

If you have an aversion to spiders.......stay out of Arkansas. We have Brown Recluse and Black Widows everywhere.

Here are some of the largest spiders found in the State.

202257

Tarantula

202258

Fishing Spider

202259

Garden Spider

[Blackwater]

OK. Confession time. I have 3 phobias, and one of them is arachnaphobia - fear of spiders. And once when I was a young kid, we found one of those huge garden spiders with the big yellow abdomens, and white flecks on it, and all the rest black except for yellow segments on the legs. This thing was HUGE! It was fully 6" across the widest point of the legs. And it'd woven a huge web under one of the old corn cribs we had.

I had my trusty BB gun, but was kind'a afraid of making this bad boy MAD! We got close, for a better inspection, and it started rocking its body back and forth using its extremely long legs, and at our tender age, we were afraid it was trying to launch itself at us like a slingshot! It's amazing what the young and uninformed mind can conjure up, isn't it? Anyway, we backed off and it quit that business, and we were very glad for that!

Again, we thought about blasting it with my BB gun, but we just couldn't get over the "what if we didn't kill it and it made it mad?" question. So we did the wise thing .... for once in our mischevious lives, at least. We went and asked Mom, and she said to just leave it alone. And we did, but gee golly wow was that HARD!

We went back in a few days. I guess we were thirsty for a little more "adventure?" And we revisited that spider and its big, huge web several days, before I finally got the nerve to let it have it with "Ol' Daisy." Once, we cut a long stick, and poked at it with that. That thing took its long fangs and sunk them what looked to be DEEP into that stick!

At school, someone said it was probably one of those highly poisonous "banana spiders" and probably got loose from a bunch of bananas at the grocery store, and they were scared they might be breeding locally, and about to take over the earth, or at least our little segment of it! Funny what those 50's sci fi films can do to impressionable young kids looking for dragons to slay and damsels to free, isn't it? But I finally shot it 20 or 30 times with my reliable ol' Daisy, and it finally succumbed.

Boy! Were we ever proud! We'd slain the mighty dragon, and possibly saved our little nook of the world from who knows what kind of awful fate! When someone finally told us they were just ordinary "garden spiders," I think I wanted to knock his nose out of joint! But ... truth is truth, and we DID at least have some fun with it, and tested our courage (and our idiocy as well, but let's not talk about that part of it, OK?). So I always chalked it up as just one more adventure (misadventure?) that would likely provice me with some great campfire stories one day. And as yet, I've not told it ONE SINGLE TIME around a camp fire! So .... I humbly submit my youthful foolishness for your .... hopefully amusement??? I think my arachnophobia comes from watching that huge spider sink its fangs into that stick? :redneck:[smilie=l:

[Tom W.]

Truthfully I don't like spiders, but I'm not terrified of them. When I was a boy in North Carolina I had a summer job harvesting tobacco. Those fields were full of a large green spider. Normally if one landed on your arm or neck you could just brush it off. One day I tried brushing one off of my neck and it bit me. That spider quickly turned into a brown gooey streak on my neck.

We have an overabundance of brown recluse an black widows here, more so where I used to live than my current abode. I just mashed a particularly ugly spider that followed me into the house after I checked on the well being off the garden spider. They aren't welcome inside the house.

[dagger dog]

The spiders that gives me the willys are the ones that spins webs across the trails in your favorite squirrel woods, especially when you walk into the woods before sunrise, seems like every web is right at face level !

[MaryB]

Or sitting in the deer stand one one decides to spin a web across your face!

[Tom W.]

And that spider web is almost strong enough to catch YOU! Those that build across the logging roads are a big juicy critters that are tan colored.

[Just Duke]

Ick!.................

[375supermag]

Hi...
I don't like spiders or any other insects for that matter.
Not a big fan of snakes, mice/rats, etc.
Just don't care much for any type of vermin, whether it is insects, reptiles or mammalian(to include certain two-legged semi-human vermin).

In fact, it seems that the more people I meet and read about what some of them do to others, according to news broadcasts, the better I like my dogs.

[Tom W.]

I felt good enough to go load a few revolver rounds, and I saw that the garden spider had rebuilt her web after we had a few days of wind and rain. I watched for a few minutes and went on to the shed. I stayed there a while , finished what I felt I could do, and before I came in I watched some more. By that time she was close to finishing up. Worn as I was I came inside. That's a huge spider for these parts!

[Mohawk Daddy]

I have garden spiders set up shop somewhere around the front of my house every year. This year it's near the entrance to my garage on some bushes beside the drive. I was outside watching it a few days ago when some kind of small blackish wasp flew straight into the web. The spider got all agitated and jumped on the wasp. I thought it was killing the wasp, but no, it was freeing it from the web. The spider kicked the wasp loose and it flew away unharmed. I guess even spiders have preferences about what they eat.