The Spider and the Mud Dauber

 

Large female garden spider

         

         I see lots of things outdoors that are hard to believe, but what I saw this past week is one of the weirdest things ever. It was outdoors just outside my workshop-fishing- hunting-book storage and pool table room up here in the wilderness where I live at.

         Out on the concrete pad, I was just sitting there beside my boat trying to figure out where I had left my tackle box, when off to the far end I see a big garden spider running across the concrete as fast as I have ever seen a spider run. And I have seen some of them run awfully fast when I was trying to stomp them in my basement. They can be fast, but none as fast as that one.

         Almost as fast was a mud dauber, behind him about thirty   inches.  And it was running, not flying. Both were heading toward the inside of my basement. Now here is the question… Why is a spider the size of a quarter running full speed from a little runt mud dauber that carries no stinger to amount to nothing?

         Some might say the two have become acquainted and the spider was trying to lead the dirt dauber to my Labrador’s water bowl. It is a well-known fact that in order to build his mud nest, the dirt dauber needs water.  He also deposits eggs in those mud chambers, or rather his immediate female counterpart does, and the two will place small spiders in the hole chambers of that mud prison for the hatching larvae to eat as they mature. But that garden spider was much too large for the mud dauber to conquer and take home for his progenies first meal.

         I don’t know, it puzzles me!  But I managed to step on both of them, because I need no spiders and dirt daubers in my basement.  I don’t like to kill things I don’t want to eat, but spiders and dirt daubers are allowed to survive in my sheds to a great extent.  But still I can’t help but wonder why that mud-dauber was chasing the garden spider on foot?  Could it be the spider had come across him and bit off one wing?  If anyone out there knows the answer to this intriguing occurrence in nature, please let me know.  I have to point out here that I do not know the gender of either insect.  They could have both been females, or one a female and one a male, who could know that?  That’s something else that I wonder about, was the answer due to a gender problem?

         I saw a bass chase a frog out on a gravel bar once, and doe deer chasing a young coyote; and I heard tell of a wild gobbler chasing a house cat, but that spider and mud dauber really perplexes me.  I just like to know the why of things when I am out studying nature as I so often do.  And I have often wondered why a big old thick steak tastes better with some fat in it, while you have to boil the heck out of a possum to remove the fat before you can bake it!  A baked possum can be made to taste just like a baked muskrat if you boil it an hour or so.  And some old rivermen say they’d rather eat a young muskrat than a barbecued coon!

 

EVIL IN A SHELL

         On a serious matter, armadillos spread leprosy?  It has been denied quite often in the past but medical people in the southern states know it is a fact. Armadillos that they have created an outbreak of leprosy in Florida, almost 100 new cases.  I have told people often through my columns to kill every armadillo they see and though it is difficult for me to make myself do it, I run over all of them I see on the highway.  They are not native to the Ozarks coming up here from across the Lborder like so many problems do.  Truckers hauling metal culverts and pipes from Texas and Oklahoma say the worthless creatures came here in loads of any kind of long pipes, because they like living in those hollow tubes.  They are perhaps as deadly an egg eater in the wild as there is.  They are a big reason whippoorwills are declining so badly.

         

       I do urge you to run over every armadillos you see on the roads you travel.  I squash armadillos often beneath these nearly-worn-out Goodyear tires of mine, but I will nearly go into the ditch to avoid a terrapin.  And what I said about being willing to run over that sheet-spreader salesman that spends so much time irritating Americans on television; I wouldn’t run into the ditch to get him like I said I would. I was joking about that! But shucks I might not mind denting my bumper on that pillow-stuffin’, money grubber if’n he was in my lane and I was going slow.