The Daily Bucket is a place where we post and exchange our observations about what is happening in the natural world in our neighborhood. Bugs, buds, birds - each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
Seattle. March 5, 2012.
I've spoken a number of times of the six-legged Cross Spider that set up housekeeping in the downstairs bathroom window last summer. She spent the summer and much of the autumn building wide beautiful webs and doing her part to keep the local housefly population under control. In December she began to slow down.
December 19, 2011. 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.
I suppose I could have cleaned the window and sent her off to the backyard, but I couldn't do it. She'd been part of the household for months. Instead I began to keep watch.
January 1, 2012. The bathroom Cross Spider is still with us.
February 2, 2012. The six-legged Cross Spider who has been living in the downstairs bathroom window since summer is still alive, though she spends most of her time curled up in a corner. There are a few puddles of spider frass on the windowsill. Does anyone know how long they live? She's getting skinnier and skinnier as the weeks go by and hasn't had a proper web since before the Winter Solstice.
I'm not sure when she built her first web in the bathroom window. July is a best guess, just after the time the windows were cleaned last summer.
December 30, 2011. 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.
A few mornings ago I noticed that she was gone. There was no body curled up on the windowsill. She was just gone. She had graced the bathroom window for seven or perhaps eight months. I will watch for a hatchling spider ball as spring evolves, but there is no evidence that she left a sac of eggs behind.
RIP, little Cross Spider.
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