Field Notes—

What Is Written In The Orb Weaver’s Web

By Curtiss Clark

In the predawn darkness of October mornings there is nothing.

That is how it seems when Kate and I venture out for our early morning walk. Typically a passing cloud has come to rest for the night on our hill and will not rouse itself for another hour and a half, when the sun will rise and prod this foggy presence into evanescence with rude and ruddy fingers. But for us, earnest walkers, it does not stir. We are wrapped in its muffle and must make our way as rapidly as our fearlessness and familiarity with the road will allow.

From the nothing of such foggy mornings, the world reassembles itself — pebble by pebble, leaf by leaf, building by building — to reveal what another night has wrought. So by breakfast, at the kitchen table, it literally dawns on us that the world will continue pretty much the same as it was — though not exactly so: the leaf litter beneath the ancient maples has piled up a little higher; a nocturnal visitor (the opossum most likely) has buckled a sunflower stalk and scavenged the fallen seeds; and there’s a beer can in the road.

These are among the few new verses of the history of this hill left behind after the retreat of the dark and fog. None, however, are so elegantly written as the new web of the orb weaver spider in the top of the privet hedge. These circular intricate webs reach their biggest size at this time of year in the last few days and weeks before the hard frost, which irrevocably separates one spider generation from the next.

In the meantime, the female that wove this web overnight hangs upside down in perfect stillness at its center. The web’s radial spokes and concentric circles reach out like an open palm for what the day has to offer. As she waits for the next lacewing, or moth, or beetle to serve itself up on her dew-laden dinner plate, she will produce an egg sac with upwards of several hundred eggs, which she will later attach to the underside of a leaf. The sac will fall with the leaf to the protection of the litter below, where the next generation of spiders will emerge in the spring. Having already mated with a supplicant male, the female orb weaver attends to this, her ultimate responsibility. Having her meals self-delivered allows her to concentrate on her progeny.

When darkness returns, she will repair her web or build it anew if it has been damaged or destroyed by the wind, or a boy with a stick, or some other untoward event, so that it may be reassembled once again in the great daily re-creation of the rising sun.

Then one night, not too long from now when a recumbent cloud stops on our hill to rest on a bed of dew and slips off at dawn from a bed of frost, a few more verses in the history of this hill will be found at first light: in tracks around the bird feeder; in the remains of a slow-footed vole. And a little bit of nothing from the predawn darkness will linger in the privet hedge where the orb weaver’s web once was, telling its own story in the exotic language of absence.