{"id":17614,"date":"2013-08-10T04:00:08","date_gmt":"2013-08-10T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=17614"},"modified":"2013-08-10T05:05:48","modified_gmt":"2013-08-10T11:05:48","slug":"common-raven-covered-with-spider-silk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/10\/common-raven-covered-with-spider-silk\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Raven Covered With Spider Silk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antelope Island\u00a0is crawling with spiders this time of year.\u00a0 Huge spiders.\u00a0 Gazillions of them.\u00a0 They’re\u00a0quite obvious everywhere you go on the north end of the island and they can be intimidating\u00a0in the extreme.<\/p>\n

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\"spider-5066[1]\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a variety of spider species on the island but the one that gets the most attention, by far,\u00a0is the orb weaver (like this one, image taken on the island).\u00a0 These arachnids can\u00a0approach the size of\u00a0the palm of your hand and their webs are very large, often draped between the sagebrush and\u00a0rabbit bush plants.\u00a0 In early morning light when these webs really stand out most folks wouldn’t even consider<\/em> taking a willy-nilly stroll off the roads and well traveled paths of the island for fear of\u00a0spiders.<\/p>\n

In fact these spiders are such a big deal on the island\u00a0the state park is featuring them with the Antelope Island Spider Festival\u00a0<\/a>which takes place today from 9 to 4 (follow the link to learn more about the spiders and the festival) .<\/p>\n

Two days ago as I was leaving the island I found a Common Raven on the west end of the causeway road.\u00a0 It looked pretty goofy\u00a0from a distance and as I got closer I\u00a0began to\u00a0realize why.<\/p>\n

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\"common<\/a><\/p>\n

It was covered with spider silk!\u00a0 Silk was draped over most of the head and it was dragging more of it from its tail and one of its feet.\u00a0 Much of the silk was matted and embedded with\u00a0debris.<\/p>\n

Ravens are opportunistic feeders and will eat almost anything available so I can only surmise that this bird may have been foraging for spiders and become entangled in their\u00a0webs during the\u00a0process.<\/p>\n

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\"common<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s a huge crop of a different image that shows the silk on the back of the head a little better.<\/p>\n

The poor bird\u00a0seemed confused about what was going on but I suspect it was able to eventually remove the silk by scratching it off with its feet and claws – a messy, sticky enterprise I’m sure.\u00a0 .<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Antelope Island is crawling with spiders this time of year. Huge spiders. Gazillions of them. They’re quite obvious everywhere you go on the north end of the island and they can be intimidating in the extreme.<\/p>\n

Two days ago as I was leaving the island I found this raven on the west end of the causeway road. It looked pretty goofy looking from a distance and as I got closer I began to realize why.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,334,1531],"tags":[31,1618,93,1617,1619,1616],"class_list":["post-17614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-common-ravens","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-arachnid","tag-common-raven","tag-orb-weavers","tag-spider-festival","tag-spiders"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/spider-50661.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4A6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}