Halloween and Spiders
Halloween is here again. Houses are decorated with witches, pumpkins, ghosts and goblins. And, of course, with spider webs. I coated our front bushes with white webs and put up wire webs on the garage doors. It's fun to decorate for the holiday.
But Mother Nature outdid all the webs in the neighborhood. A spider worked its way down from the roof of our garage and spun a magnificent web that made my attempts laughable. It anchored the bottom of the web on a bush and then sat in the middle waiting around for a meal to be caught.
Spider webs are well constructed. The spider has a plan. It mixes non-sticky threads with sticky ones in a symmetrical design. And it does it fairly quickly for such complexity. A spider might be small but don't diminish its capabilities: it has spider smarts.
The more I observe nature, the more I realize that everything has intelligence. Plants do. Insects do. Animals and birds are pretty darn smart. It may differ from how we think but it is functional for how to survive. If we diminish anything in nature we lessen our own understanding of life.
So on this spooky holiday, when we say WOOOOO, let's remember it is more than being scary, it is being observant.
A look at web-making:
Get to know spiders:
More Deer
I saw another deer, well, three actually. This time they were healthy and strong unlike the poor deer that wandered into my backyard last time. They ambled about hardly paying any attention to the humans mesmerized by their presence. I wondered what they were finding to eat. Did they like the tiny Rose of Sharon bushes that were trying to get started at the foot of the maple tree? Were they munching on the wild strawberry plants that tend to spread wherever they can?
They wandered through the hedges into one neighbor's yard, then moved to another. Then they moved on, to where I don't know. I think it was to the woods a couple of blocks away from the elementary school. But to get there, they would have to cross a busy road and several streets. Surely someone must see them on the way. I try to be on the lookout for wandering deer but they always pop up as a surprise.
*"At high population levels, white-tailed deer can pose significant challenges to human health and safety through deer-vehicle collisions and associations with tick-borne illnesses, and have a detrimental impact on both forest biodiversity and tree regeneration. Deer have no natural predators on Staten Island. Thus, a handful of recently arrived deer (presumed to have swum from New Jersey) have over the past few years quickly multiplied in number, and a 2014 aerial survey counted the deer population at 763.
"The City has developed an integrated, non-lethal, site-specific management plan that will allow experts to take immediate steps to reduce future impacts of an over-abundant deer population. The four-pronged plan includes:
Sterilization Study: A three-year surgical sterilization study focused on male deer. Past studies of surgical sterilization have demonstrated a 10 to 30 percent decline in annual population. We propose focusing on males for this research project for several reasons. First, the procedure is simpler to perform and less invasive for the animal. Second, there are typically far fewer males than females in suburban populations. Third, males can be operated on year-round providing a broader implementation window. This is particularly important in an area as large as Staten Island. Finally, the island constricts immigration of males that typically are more transient in the landscape, thus making this approach more likely to succeed than in a more contiguous landscape.
Traffic Safety Measures to reduce deer-vehicle collisions including signage, education, and deer resistant plantings on roadways.
Extensive Public Education focusing on living safely with deer in an urban environment, including driver education to reduce deer-vehicle collisions, public health education to reduce the incidence of tick bites and tick-borne illnesses, and environmental education to discourage feeding and encourage the planting of deer resistant plants.
Natural Resource Protections include new fences around planted forest, tree guards on new trees, deer-resistant plantings and further protective measures."
Have any thoughts on the issue?
Editor's Note: We have a well-established dynasty of deer around our home in Berkeley and have tried the usual deterrents, including human hair, scarecrow water sprinklers and bars of soap.
Lately, however, we're employing a Predator Guard Solar-Powered deterrent: it has a fox-like-head silhouette that emits a red flashing light during the evening mounted on a post and night hours. We move it every few weeks so the deer think there's some actual movement to the 'animal'; it seems to be working well as the flashing lights seem more effective than sprays (ewww!) that have to be renewed after any rain storm.
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