Late August is, as always, the season for giant orb-weaving spiders, one of which spun a web between two tall cactus plants on the patio and greeted us with this sight one morning:
We’re big fans of both spiders and dragonflies, but it was obvious who came out on top in this contest:
These things are unimaginably weird:
Even with the spider busy at lunch, she has four eyes to spare. They reflect the flash and appear as white-centered dark dots near the middle of the image:
I’m sure the red spinnerets are diagnostic:
The spider tossed the empty husk over the side, then spent the next two nights and days parked in her lair, presumably digesting that big meal, and didn’t bother repairing the web:
She spun a fresh web on the third night and caught a more manageable insect:
All hand-held with the Sony DSC-H5, some with a 2x close-up lens. All the pix are tight crops, crushed to fit my arbitrary 750 pixel maximum and 200 kB size limit. If you need high-res original images for anything, drop me a note; I took far too many pictures of this encounter…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Interesting series of photographs,
Thanks
I’m remembering the classic Far Side [sniff] cartoon, with two spiders finishing a web at the bottom of a playground slide: “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!”