Firstly, I’d like to apologise for the dearth of blog posts lately. The website has been in process of transferring servers and this has been more of a prolonged nightmare than imagined, with many unexpected side effects and hiccups.
Hopefully we can now get back into a routine of weekly posts, where I snap and rabbit on about my wildlife and webmaster Fred turns them into web language.
On a bushwalk I noticed this odd swathing at the base of a tree.
A bug-savvy friend tells me this is probably the home of one of the ‘bag moth caterpillars’ — family Ochrogaster, also called procession caterpillars. Apparently they feed at night on the tree and ‘hide’ in their web during daylight.
Then I found a smaller swathing. Having harvested the Kangaroo Apple bushes which were about at the end of their season, I’d put the oldest fruit in a dish, prior to planting them.
I’d left it overnight on a table on the verandah.
In the morning, I found they were neatly and thoroughly enmeshed by the web of a tiny, hard-working spider.
What amazed me was how it had formed anchor points on the smooth sides of the stainless steel dish. Some superglue!