Funnel-web Spiders

We arrived home last week. On the way we stayed overnight in a hotel in Kindersley. In the morning we walked the dogs down a dirt lane behind the hotel. The spider webs were obvious in the early light, but it was Helen who noticed each web had central pit. When I went back to take photos I found 5 or 6 webs within a small area. While I saw some movement I did not try to tease any of the spiders out. Once we were home I learned these were a type of Funnel-web spider often called hobo or grass spiders but I do not know the actual species, I have always been interested insects and want to do more micro-photography. I will make it a priority  next year at the cabin. Just before we left the cabin I noticed a number of different spiders dropping from the bark we collected for the fires which really intrigued me so I would like to try to indentify them next year. 

https://www.livescience.com/41515-funnel-web-spiders.html

As I edited the photos I began to see the beauty in the compositions themselves, This in turn has led me to manipulate the images a bit more. The central eye with its network of webs and the bright colours of the mini forests seen from above, reminded me of other natural images science exposes us to. Images of the brain, aerial shots of hurricanes, the clouds of cosmic dust that swirl out among the galaxies. 

My favourite photographer Eliot Porter created a book of photos based on natural patterns, Nature's Chaos, Eliot Porter - James Gleick, and this is something I would love to emulate in future photos.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157979.Nature_s_Chaos

"The Spider as an Artist
Has never been employed --
Though his surpassing Merit
Is freely certified

By every Broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian Land --
Neglected Son of Genius
I take thee by the Hand --"

Emily Dickinson

Departures

"Looked at from a distance, the forest seems 
Haunted. But safe within its narrow room 
Its light is innocent and green, as though 
Emerging from another dream of diminution 
We found ourselves of normal, human size, 
Attempting to touch the leaves above our heads. 
Why couldn't we have spent our summers here, 
Surrounded and growing up again? "

from Summer Home

by John Koethe

Meet the neighbours; Eastern Phoebe

   In previous years the spot up at the apex of the cabin under the peak of the roof and just to the left of the door (handy for us when they poop) has been occupied by Barn Swallows. Some years three or more pairs have had nests somewhere on the cabin in a single year. At least once a brood was raised among the joists under the cabin.  Eastern Phoebes have been around since we started the cabin.  They are incredibly inquisitive and always watching whatever is going on but their nest was normally under the peak at the back of the cabin. This year one pair has occupied the nest site in front. There are no Barn Swallows at the cabin this year and few at the farm.  This may be part of a widespread decline in their population. The Phoebe likes to whack its catch, often dragonflies against joists that jut out from the cabin. I did not realize how much time they spend by the water, but ours often fly from the cabin to branches sticking out of the water by the edge of the slough.  ( The Birder' Companion notes: diet occ small fish and frogs.) One evening in a steady rain I caught a tent caterpiller moth in the cabin. I opened the door and tossed it out watching it fly, beating its wings frantically, thru the rain when a Phoebe came down from the nest in a beautiful curving fall and scooped it up. 

 

    

"Now the seasons are closing their files

on each of us, the heavy drawers

full of certificates rolling back

into the tree trunks, a few old papers

flocking away."

Meet the neighbours: Red Squirrels

One of the longest tenured of our mammalian neighbours is the Red Squirrel. It is probably the one I am most familar with as well, having encountered them in both the country and occassionally in the city since I moved west, They had been replaced by the larger Eastern Grey Squirrel in Sounthern Ontario where I grew up. In our Edmonton apartment one claimed the spruce tree next to the window of our third floor apartment and chattered at us when we entered the room. In one archaeological field camp one would drop a spruce cone 30 or more feet unto the corrugated plastic roof of the outhouse, which sounds like a gunshot in the narrow space. At the cabin the one moved in one year and began to build a nest at the peak of the   roof in the kitchen. We have also had a number of encounters with them in the outhouse which started when they attempted to fill it with mushrooms, spruce cones being in short supply in the aspen parklands. They also go after the young birds and we suspect they are responsible for the disappearance of the robin nestlings from the ledge behind the cabin. One also likes to come up on the porch in the early morning and proclaim its mastery of the territory. They also have the occasional dustup with somewhat mystified neighbours unaware of their status. 

"With an host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and a horse of air,

To the wilderness I wander. 

By a knight of ghosts and shadows, 

I summoned am to a tourney 

Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end: 

Methinks it is no journey.? "

from Tom O’Bedlam

Coming thru.

Excuse me, do you know who I am?

I am bigger then I look you know.

Okay the sneak attack.

Attack from the rear, he suspects nothing!

My rock.

Turkey Vulture over the hayfield.

 Today was incredibly windy. Helen and her mom were off the town so they dropped me at the gate and I walked thru the hayfield to the cabin. This vulture was obviously enjoying the updrafts. It is always interesting to me that their flight feathers appear grey/white in the correct light. I have yet to capture a great photo of these magnificant birds, but I am, always happy to see them. It also means I can quote one of my favourite poems.

Both quotes are from Under the Vulture Tree by David Bottoms.

"We have all seen them circling pastures,

have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,   

the fences of our own backyards, and have stood   

amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift."

"calling them what I'd never called them, what they are,

those dwarfed transfiguring angels,

who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle

crushed on the shoulder of the road,

who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost,

with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings."

Meet the neighbours; Sapsuckers

  Last summer Helen and I found a tree pastb the hay field where a large section of bark had been perforated by a number of fairly regularly spaced retangular wounds. We had no idea what had done this. This year we encountered a fairly secretive bird while walking the dogs, it was always in the same grouping of a few poplars and some willows. We finally saw it was a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. We also realized it had created the same type of scars, called a sap well on one of the treees  Further reading indicated that it defended these wells against other birds including Hummingbirds. A few days later we noticed Waxwings were at the wells and sure enough the Sapsucker appeared. We have often seen Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, every year the young inspect a dead tree next to the porch. But this is the first time we have seen a we have seen a sap well near the cabin.

 

More photos of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker here.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/search?q=sapsucker

"Every morning
the world
is created.

Under the orange 
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again 
and fasten themselves to the high branches —"

from Morning Poem

by Mary Oliver

Red-Tail flying

" the plane gained more height and broke through the clouds and reached the great transparency of the sky.  It occurred to him that the sky is an emptiness that sits on a layer of cotton wool and has no limit, an ungraspable manifestation of the mystery...,":

from The Blond Baboon
by Janwillen van de Wetering

Bald Eagle and Red Tailed Hawks?

 Saturday while on the Thickwood Hills Studio Trail I noticed a Bald Eagle being harassed by what I think are a pair of Red-Tailed Hawks. I am used to seeing crows and blackbirds harrassing larger birds but not one raptor after another which is why I am sharing the not great photos. Lyrics from John Denver's The Eagle and The Hawk.

(again sorry about the spacing)

"I am the eagle

I live in high country

In rocky cathedrals that reach to the sky"

"I am the hawk

And there's blood on my feathers

But time is still turning they soon will be dry"

                                     

"And all those who see me

And all who believe in me

Share in the freedom I feel when I fly"

Seen on a road trip two

"But the fool on the hill

Sees the sun going down

And the eyes in his head

See the world spinning round"

Beatles

Seen on a road trip

"When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge 

Of one of many circles."

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

Caragana and Tansy by the old house.

Caragana and Tansy grow by the door of the old house Helen lived in until she was about eight. In the past both were valued bacause they would grow in the harsh environment of the Canadian Prairies. Now this ability to flourish in these conditions means they are considered weed species because they spread if not rigourously checked.

“And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence - that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I've tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.”

from A Place on Earth
by Wendell Berry

Concrete overpass on trip to Hafford for lunch. Part 2

  ''one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world,

on the great grass plains or the sage brush desert.

That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long

after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but

 he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild

and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened

the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the

prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning,

into the morning!''

from Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

Concrete overpass on trip to Hafford for lunch. Part 1

  Tuesday we took Helen's mom to lunch at the great A&M Bistro in Hafford. Each time we take that hwy Helen is more and more intrigued by an old concrete overpass over the railroad. Both railroad and road are long abandoned but on the way home Helen wanted to see what was still there. The answer, beautiful views. Even the remaining concrete bridge is lovely, save for some callow  graffiti. The last two years Helen and I have climbed Memorial Hill in Shelllake for the view. But the Shell Lake area is the parkland and the views are restricted. South of Blaine Lake you are in the prairie and it shows with these rolling vistas. I will split the photos into two posts, because I cannot choose just one or two.

"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon

it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller

used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter

was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm,

and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told

the story.  This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put

plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even

the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was

already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and

song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,—these he had

caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,—and this would always be his"

                                         from Lost Lady

                                                     Willa Cather