Ah! Bugs!

One change moving from urban to suburban that hasn't been positive is the number of bugs. Naturally you would think that ew, city, very dirty, but while that may be true, the bug level seems to be on the lowside. There are flies of course, and, shhhhhhuuuuddddeeerrrr, cockroaches (big ones!), but other than that, there are really very few bugs that you see on a regular basis and most buildings have an exterminator that comes round usually once a week, so, unless you are a total slob, you don't even really see those very often.

Here it's completely different. This has been the summer of bugs. And I have seen some REALLY BIZARRE creatures, things that I have never in my life laid eyes on. I wish I had pictures of them, but inevitably they catch me offguard as I'm strolling through the neighborhood, or, heaven forbid, strolling through my house and one of two things happens: either I'm outside and I run or I'm inside and I strike out at the wee beastie, squashing it into wee beastie pulp, beyond all recognition, clearly before adequate preservation techniques can be employed.

This morning, however, we headed out the backdoor to pile in the car for Thomas's first soccer "game" of the fall season and nearly walked headlong into this, which a very intrepid spider had built IN THE COURSE OF A SINGLE NIGHT (you will probably have to click on the image to see it in its full glory):

Here's a close-up:

Mr(s). spider was quite grumpy to see us as (s)he was wrapping up a tasty meal in the center of the web and was forced to abandon it to cower surreptitiously up in a corner, hoping we would pass by and not happen to notice the enormous, over two foot diameter web that (s)he had built from the tip of our porch railing to the overhang of our roof. Here's a picture of the intrepid arachnid:

The thing looks to me to be what I've always known as a crab spider, but google image search produced crab spiders that don't really resemble this. The only thing I've seen otherwise is the thorn spider, but those appear to be native to Madagascar, so the chance of one being in our little backyard in Princeton Junction is, hopefully, rare. If anyone knows what this thing is, let me know. I'm pretty curious.

When we returned from soccer, the web was still there, but the spider and its tasty meal were gone. Don't know if the spider is planning to come back, but I hope it's moved on because Nate has promised to take the hose to the web ASAP.

UPDATE: Nate has actually caught the spider and is gleefully taking it upstairs to alcohol it. Up close and personal, the spider looks very different than from its initial wrapped up position. It has a distinctive marking on its abdomen that we're trying now to use to identify it.