{"id":74247,"date":"2019-08-06T05:49:13","date_gmt":"2019-08-06T11:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=74247"},"modified":"2019-08-06T07:34:54","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T13:34:54","slug":"spiders-galore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/06\/spiders-galore\/","title":{"rendered":"Spiders Galore"},"content":{"rendered":"

I usually publish a spider post about this time every year This is it.<\/p>\n

I realize that out of fear or revulsion (or both) some folks won’t even look at photos of spiders but I hope most of my readers feel differently. I think spiders are marvels of evolution and many of them are actually beautiful in their own way.<\/p>\n

I took all of these photos on Antelope Island yesterday morning. This time of year spiders proliferate in the sagebrush and rabbitbrush near the shore of the Great Salt Lake, in part to take advantage of the billions of brine flies and other flying insects as a food source. Most of the spiders in these photos are types of orb weavers but I won’t attempt to identify them by species for fear of getting one or more of them wrong (I’m no arachnid expert). I’ll include very little text below – the photos mostly speak for themselves.<\/p>\n

Most of these photos were taken at f\/7.1 with my Canon 7D Mark II and my Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM lens with a 1.4 extender attached.<\/p>\n

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A fairly large male walking a tightrope upside down and downhill.<\/p>\n

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In many of my photos the spider silk they were suspended from was completely invisible so I cropped this image unconventionally to include as much of the web as I reasonably could.<\/p>\n

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I thought the markings on this female were unusually striking.<\/p>\n

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The spider silk in many webs is precisely and often even geometrically arranged but it seems this female had a tendency to be just a bit sloppy.<\/p>\n

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Even though the markings on this one are much more subtle I think he’s a sleek beauty.<\/p>\n

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Another messy housekeeper.<\/p>\n

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This hungry lady barely moved the entire time I was there as she (presumably) sucked out the body juices of one or more of her entwined victims.<\/p>\n

I don’t want spiders in my house but I find them fascinating and even beguiling in the natural world and that fascination began at an early age. When I was a kid I used to keep spiders, including Black Widows, as pets in our window wells, occasionally throwing a small grasshopper or other insect I’d captured into their web.<\/p>\n

Watching how they responded to the proffered food kept me entertained for quite a while. At that age keeping me entertained and out of trouble was an accomplishment that my mother appreciated, despite some misgivings.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Addendum:<\/em><\/p>\n

Elsewhere that morning I photographed (poorly) my first White-lined Sphinx Moth of the season. Despite an obvious flaw I decided to include one of those photos here as a “peace offering” to those readers who might not appreciate my spider photos.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I only had a few seconds with the moth as it was feeding on nectar in flight and in my best shot there was a flower cluster in front of its right wing. It did come out more in the open once but dirty camera contacts caused autofocus to stop working so I missed those shots. <\/em><\/p>\n

Hate it when that happens…<\/em><\/p>\n

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

I realize that out of fear or revulsion (or both) some folks won’t even look at photos of spiders but I hope most of my readers aren’t in that category. I think spiders are marvels of evolution and many of them are actually beautiful in their own way. <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74253,"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":[334],"tags":[31,160,4656,311,2170],"class_list":["post-74247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-great-salt-lake","tag-orb-weaver-spiders","tag-utah-2","tag-white-lined-sphinx-moth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/spider-6139-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-jjx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74247","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=74247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}