September Spider

On silken scaffold

waiting for airborne dinner.

– fading summer warmth.

Notes: in sunny fields (or perhaps your garden), in late summer, you might come across this lovely spider – Argiope aurantia. This species has a lot of common names, but my favourites is the “Black and Yellow Garden Spider” because, well, it’s yellow and black and can sometime be found in a garden! You see the large females in late summer because that is when they mature. These spiders are not aggressive, and just want to hang out and catch flying insects (as prey) in their sturdy webs, before the frost hits. Their webs are especially sturdy because they spin a strong , dense, ‘zig zag’ structure called a stabilimentum into parts of the web. If you run into their webs, you surely notice because they are strong and in the late summer, can be quite large (perhaps up to two feet in diameter). Arachnids are to be admired, not feared, and this species is truly admirable.