This week I found one bug one bird and one plant in my backyard to identify.
This is not a bug, actually. It’s a Venusta Orchard Spider. Bugs have six legs and spiders have eight.
It makes a web between flowers in our garden. The web is 11 inches across. It sticks to the underside of the web and waits for the bugs to get near and get stuck in the web. This means that my mom laid down under the web to take this picture!
If you touch the web by accident it runs to the ropes that the web is built on. (Maverick is referring to the anchoring threads that the spider first puts down, called the frame threads.)
We have lots of orchard spiders. I found thirteen in one walk around the yard.
The body is about 1/4 of an inch and if you count the legs it is about an inch. This means it is a female because the male is smaller than that. 1/8 of an inch.
This bird is an American Robin. We have lots of them too.
They are black brown on top and orange red on the tummy.
They are medium size. They are bigger than a hummingbird and smaller than a crow.
They eat worms in our yard. They do not come to the feeder.
Robin’s eggs are blue. We’ve seen them on the ground after they fell out of the nest.
Robins can be found pretty much anywhere in the whole United States. When you see a robin that is supposed to mean spring is here, but we have them sometimes in winter too.
This is called a wood strawberry. They are like wild strawberries except on wild strawberries the seeds are in pits and on a wood strawberry they are on the skin’s surface.
Also on a wild strawberry the flowers are white but on a wood strawberry they are yellow.
And wild strawberries are good to eat but wood strawberries are not! They are disgusting. But they are not poisonous.
Wood strawberries are very small and grow in the grass.
This is a flower that will turn into a wood strawberry.
Websites I used:
Spidersrule.com
wildmanstevebrill.com
(In the interest of full disclosure: Mav dictated this and I typed it because he hates typing. But he did all his own research.)
[…] I had just moved from the city to not-quite-but-close-enough-to-be-called-country and I wanted to document all the flora and fauna; we called this bit being “backyard naturalists.” […]