The Interlopers

Warning: spiders and bugs and other critters ahead!


Last Sunday I was killing time before my mom and sister got ready to go over to my newlywed cousin's house. They happy couple (family, actually; her new husband has two teenage sons from a previous marriage) was having an open house / post-wedding reception reception / housewarming at their new house, and my sister would be leaving directly from there on the trip back to her own house, so she was taking some time packing.

So, naturally, I decided to go outside and see how my spider was doing.


It was doing just fine.

I looked this bad boy (girl, actually) up in my National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders, and it turns out it has the unexciting name of "Barn Spider." Well, it could be a "Garden Spider," which is similar in general shape and color, though it does look to be different in the abdomen and pedipalps.

It is really a gorgeous spider. It has looked bigger each time I've seen it recently - though today I didn't see it at all. Maybe it's gone off to Spider Heaven.

I saw this fellow on the screen door and knew I had to get a picture. Its geometric, almost crystalline shape made me think immediately that it was a relative of the beautiful emerald bug Mary Ruth from Where's The Bubbler? posted a while back. It is. What she found was a Green Stink Bug, while mine is a relative with the more dignified name of Spined Soldier Bug. While hers is a plant-destroying pest, mine is insectivorous and is sometimes considered a beneficial predator, though it can be indiscriminate in its diet and eat beneficial insects as well as pests.

My mom stepped out onto the porch with a plastic take-out container from soup from the Chinese restaurant downtown and asked me to pick some tomatoes for my sister. "OK, let me put my camera on the porch," I said. Then I changed my mind. "No, I'll take it with me in case I see something interesting." Yeah, like that was going to happen. The tomatoes are right at the base of the porch, just a short walk from where I was standing. What could I possibly see there that would be worth photographing? Well, maybe tomatoes.

As I approached the tomatoes a cat dashed out from the gardens. It was Mommy, the little Tabby who was mother to the little pride in our backyard: Squiggles the Tabby, Dot the black cat with a few strands of white, and Spookybear, the black cat with no fear of humans. She is also, I believe, grandmother to Socks, the Tabby with white paws and white patches on his face, who I believe may be the result of a mating between Spookybear and Sugar, the free-roaming pet cat from across the street. (I know her name is Sugar because I was able to read her tag when I picked her up while petting her, the day that she decided to come over and visit while I was mowing the lawn. Spookybear paid a lot of attention to her that afternoon, and I think he snuck across the street for some trysting.)

Mommy is appropriately named, because it turns out she just had another litter of kittens. We have talked about trapping her and getting her spayed, but right now I can't afford it. I hadn't seen the litter yet, but they were reportedly being kept in our neighbor's yard somewhere.

That report, it turns out, is out of date.

I saw motion in the tomatoes - little dark moving animals. Rabbits?, I thought. No, not rabbits. Kittens.

On the left is one of two Tabby kittens. Notice the bright blue eyes. One of the Tabby kittens has a stubby little tail only a few inches long, barely half the length of its body. I'm used to kittens (like Scooter and Nicky) who start off life with tails longer than their bodies, and then grow into their tails.

Here's another view of the Tabby kitten hiding under the tomatoes. I didn't have my flash on and the kittens were in the shade, so the shutter stayed open long enough for the picture to be blurred.

And this was a surprise. A Tortoiseshell kitten. You can't see it here, but it has the classic split face, making it look like it was patched together out of pieces of several other cats.

The kittens are still hanging around. They're now old enough that Mommy has shown them where the humans put the food out in bowls several times each day. They're still wary of us, which is good. I wish we could trap them and tame them and keep them as pets; in a few weeks it will be too late, and it will be impossible to domesticate them. Socks is past that threshold, I think, though the older cats seem to have learned that there is safety in sticking close to my mom's house or her neighbor's house. In a sense they are semi-domesticated, though still feral. I fear that they could easily fall prey to Coyotes (which I know range in this area) or Fishers (which I don't.)

There's an ethical question here. If we keep feeding them, they will stay around the neighborhood and keep reproducing. If we don't, they will move on and/or starve or die in some other way in the Big Wide World. Which is better? At least for now I assuage my guilt by assuring myself that they keep the local populations of rabbits and voles down.