Spiders and Bugs and Spiders, Oh My!

Katydid on my cousin John's head, Wilmington, OH 9/08

One of the many cool spiders we have seen on our travels.

Rhino beetle at our campsite in Kentucky 8/08

Daph's 38th Birthday in Tennessee

We have been camping in Wilmington, Ohio for one week. I have a little catching up and filling in to do so here goes....
If you have been reading our posts, then you may recall my birthday post last month. It ended with a comment about watching my dad and Shanti canoeing across a peaceful pond. Right after I finished the post, my dad and Shanti suddenly sounded distressed. I quickly road back to camp to see what the commotion was all about. It turns out that shortly before they got back to land Shanti realized there was a large female black widow right between his legs in the front of the canoe! Needless to say, he was not happy, but he did manage to keep it together enough that the canoe made it to land where he was able to jump out and run. Personally, I have always liked spiders (and snakes), but the poisonous ones do give me the creeps. While we were camping in Tennessee and Kentucky there was an exceptionally large quantity of large creepy spiders, and we ended up killing quite a few in the RV because I got a couple of nasty bites. I never made it a practice to kill spiders indoors in Texas since we had a large space to share with them; however, the RV just isn't big enough to share peacefully with the creepy crawlies. So now we are in Ohio, and the only spiders I have seen on a daily basis are daddy long legs and some large red mites. Brian was doing some general maintenance around the RV today, and he called me up to check out a spider which had set up a home inside of our RV hitch in the back of our pickup. It's brown, and it has a very distinctive reddish orange hourglass on its abdomen. It also had a very cool, and very large egg sac. Very carefully, with gloves on, we managed to capture the spider and its egg sac in a glass jar. While we were capturing the spider it pulled its legs close to its body and played dead. It was very easy to find photos and articles about the Brown Widow spider on the internet. Here's a website with pictures that look just like our catch if you are interested: http://www.247wildlife.com/brown-widow-spider.htm
We're not sure how long we will keep her, but she is safe for now and we dropped in some dinner for her.

Anyway, we're having a nice time, and have visited with my Ohio family. My Grandma turned 90 in August, and it has been nice to just sit with her (her hearing and vision are not so great). Daphnie's cousin John came out to our campsite to spend the night with us, and then he took us all to the Cincinnati Zoo where he has been volunteering in the summertime for a few years. John was great with the kids (I can't believe he's 17), and we all really enjoyed his company.