Bats anyone? How about spiders?

On Monday the 20th, the Rainier Audubon Society will be having a speaker on birds, and bats. So plan to attend. I figure that most of the bats are sleeping right now, and I haven't seen any in the night sky in about 2 weeks, even with the warm weather going into late September. Oh well, that's gone now.

But was is out in full, besides the Canadian Geese flying this way and that, are the spiders. Our rose garden in Kent has turned into a spider condo, with every spare plane, where one could build a web, taken. In fact one of the uber spiders of the species (I'm still looking it up to find out which one), I think moved into one fo the webs, and ate the builder and plopped herself in the middle one sunny day. Rough neighborhood.

Actually, I think the spiders I'm seeing are not wolf spiders, but orb spiders, some of which can get quite big, and apparently wander indoors during the winter (good maybe they can eat some of the fruit flies that seem to spontaneously combust in my kitchen. Here's a cool spider site, courtesy of WSU.

Is that bee alive? No, dinner

We were doing our usual walk around the block last night, and looking for bats above, and bees, hanging onto lavendar, below. I stopped to inspect one of the bees, when Jennifer asked "Hey, I think that bee's dead."

No, just sleeping.

No, dead, she responds. That spider (green small one, that lives on butterfly bushes) just crawled away from it.

So I poked it and sure enough. Dead, and dry. I found this blog (which is very cool, all about bugs) and decided it's a green lynx spider (go down to the Sept. 2007 post). Funny,the guy was asking about what the spider was that had just munched down a bee in front of him. Apparently the spider gets its name from pouncing on its prey like a cat.