Subject: My Pumpkin (orb weaving??) Spider
Location: Northern Arizona, inside my house
September 11, 2015 8:45 am
In the warm beginning of September in Northern Arizona:
He came into the night…
Weaving a thick web the size of our T.V. in the shape of the superman symbol…but instead of a ‘S’ in the center it was multiple circles- until he rested in the center of his creation.
I went, unknowingly, over to our TV to check it’s measurements when I felt a thick cord about the size of the smallest string on a guitar.
Panic and adrenaline began to pulse through my veins as I jumped back and followed the string to the cause of my fear.
There ,looking as though he was just floating in space, was a bright orange spider. I had never seen one like him before.
“Was it even a spider?”
Because it had all it’s legs pulled around it at the time.
Shortly after I thought that it HAD to be a spider since it was sitting in a web! I trembled as I tried to get close enough to the spider to take it’s picture. As I got closer I noticed his body was round with a white stripe down the center of what I previously thought was a completely round body. As I got closer I was able to see it was round with two points in the front of his body. His legs are long and striped intermittently with brown and white.
As long as he stayed where he was until my husband got home than we could live peacefully together.
But for now I will constantly glance in his direction, making sure he doesn’t disappear, in the warm beginning of September in Northern Arizona.
Signature: Megan
Dear Megan,
We are charmed by your prose. This is most definitely an Orbweaver, but we are relatively certain it is not a Pumpkin Spider. We are favoring it being a Cat Faced Spider, Araneus gemmoides, and you can compare your image to this BugGuide image.