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Muffet

As in 'Little Miss....'



Our kitchen window is a great place to grow cactus. One in particular was from a trip to south eastern Colorado in 1974. We also put in herbs, orchids, and other things in there which creates a hot bed of little flying things.   


About 2 months ago we started to notice that we had fewer and fewer of those flying things. But we did see some little dots on the shelf at the bottom of the window. That's when we noticed Muffet in the upper left hand corner of the window.

Muffet is a cobweb spider (I looked it up on Google), one of the most common house spiders in the US. Normally Patti does not tolerate spiders in the house but we began to think there may be a correlation between Muffet's appearance and the lack of flying things. Sure enough, I watched her crawling towards a small dot stuck in her web. After about 5 minutes of dining she dropped the bug on the shelf, exactly where we find them. 

This symbiotic relationship has given me a lot of entertainment figuring out her daily pattern. Mornings she goes to the upper corner and waits, in the evening she travels her web and collects her meal for the day. 

Rarely do we see a flying thing and when we do it's gone by the next day. For me she has added hours of satisfied observation. For Patti the word SPIDER! has been added to SQUIRREL! to get my attention (which gives her hours of fun).

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