Scenes from the back (and front) yard, 9/28/08

Attention arachnophobes: this post contains big huge pictures of a spider! Out of concern for your well-being, I have moved them to the end. Which screws up the chronological flow. I hope you're happy.


It seemed like there might be a rainbow today, so I got the camera all ready. But there wasn't. I was faked out. Standing on the steps to the back porch, I scanned the sky and saw...nothing. Nothing but sun-tinged clouds mostly blotting out the sky. I turned my head from side to side and saw, on my left, that there was very much something.

It was a spider. A big huge gigantic spider, maybe 3/4" long from head to spinners. This is a spider that has been spinning webs across our back steps. Big webs. Strong webs. I know, I've walked through a few.

Now that's worth a photo, I thought.

And it was. Several photos. But, as I explained above, I have moved that section of this post to the end.

***********************

I remembered as I came back in from photographing the spider that my mom had pointed out a mushroom under the Oak tree in the front yard as we drove to church this morning. Mushrooms are fragile things with a quick life-cycle. Even if the mushroom managed to not get trod upon by a clumsy human or done in by the curiosity of a feral cat, it would still dump its load of spores and wither away in just a few days. I realized this was probably the best time to try to get a photo. So I did.


I noticed a few other items of interest in the neighborhood of the Oak. For one thing, these little mushrooms, barely half an inch across:

These tiny things are what the Polish old-timers refer to as "podpinki" or something like that - my spelling may be off. My mom says the "pod" part means "under" in Polish. I do not think that there is an official definition of what podpinki actually are, and I know that it is dangerous to eat random wild mushrooms.

(Fun fact: my grandmother always pointed out that divorce rates were low back in her day because in the event of irreconcilable differences between a husband and wife, the wife would simply poison her husband. Podpinki were probably the means of resolving these differences in more than a few instances.)


Oak leaf. One of the first that has changed color. There will be more.

This object, know as an Oak Apple Gall, also started off life as an Oak leaf. But a tiny wasp laid an egg within the layers of the leaf, and a series of remarkable biological processes (are there any other kinds?) kicked in to protect the tree from the invader by forming a gall - and, consequently, providing a cozy home for the developing wasp.

Barberry. This attractive thorny plant, covered with round maroon-colored leaves and bright red elongated berries, is actually an invasive perennial. It started off life about fifteen years ago as a few shoots of what we thought might be some sort of winter-hardy Eucalyptus. It is now a shrub several feet across, and has started generating offspring.

Holly. The holly berries are at their peak brightness, I think. Will they keep until Christmas?


Arachnophobes: this is where you get off. Beyond this point there be spiders.


Ye've been warned.


Be it upon your own heads.


They gone?


Good.


Now, check this out:

The spider was between me and the bright sky in this image. Note the alternating light and dark segments in the legs.

A slightly different angle, with more of the sky showing.

Now I shifted so the light was reflecting off the spider, rather than shining through it. These pictures are tricky with my Nikon Coolpix L4 - the autofocus is constantly trying to settle on a focal plane somewhere other than where you are trying to photograph. Also, the tightness of the focus at extremely close range means that sometimes some parts of an object will be in focus while some parts are out of focus. In this case the lens was about a foot away from the spider, and the photos were made more difficult because the spider was above eye level, so I had to take the pictures with the camera held above my head. (As opposed to the mushroom photos, where I sprawled on my belly on the wet lawn to get the photos. The things I go through for you people!)

One last shot of the spider in its web. The twisting of the web makes it look like a physical expression of a graphical representation of a mathematical formula in three dimensions. Which, of course, it is.

So there you have it. Mushrooms and spiders and Oak Apple Galls, oh my! What kind of amazing stuff is just outside your house, waiting to be noticed?