Charlie's Web !!!

For the last one week, all of us are fascinated by Charlie. His knowledge of and experience with architecture and geometry is amazing, mesmerizing and mind-blowing. Charlie springs in to action in the evening around sunset. We love watching Charlie doing his work. Charlie is the name given by Swetha and Shreya to the spider (in fond memory of Charlotte's Web) who has taken over our backyard.

The Sun illuminating the web and the spider.

Though I have seen many spider webs and how the spider wraps its catch and eats it back home in India, this is definitely different and a large scale execution. A close examination of the spider web revealed many long anchors. The spider first builds these anchors and then constructs the spokes that lead from the anchors towards the center of the web. I counted 24 spokes in Charlie's web. Once the spokes are done, the spider starts at the outermost and weaves the threads that connects all the spokes. As it does, it reaches the center and  rests there waiting for a catch. Sometimes, it goes over the anchor threads again and again to make it really strong.  Then by midday or so, it completely dismantles the central web leaving the anchors in place. At sunset, the whole process of constructing the web starts again. As soon as we all get up and come down in the morning we check Charlie.

Charlie in action !!!

Today I grilled Panner Tikka and afterwards had left the grill cover open to cool it. Unfortunately the open grill cover was close to the plane where Charlie builds his web daily. We don't know how Charlie figured this out but he had moved the plane of the web a foot away from the open grill cover. We also noticed that Charlie had  moved one of his anchors today. The length of the longest anchor is approximately, 25 feet from a distance plant to the BBQ island. 

Of course, I am always eager to connect the earth to the deep sky and tried shooting the stars with Charlie's web in the foreground. This was a very difficult project and I had to throw some light on the web to make it visible.

The Big Dipper's (Ursa Major) handle is right above Charlie's Web. The large white streaks are the some of the anchors!

Whenever we go to the backyard, we are very gingerly walking around so that we don't disturb Charlies anchors. We all have become very attached to Charlie, even Swetha who is afraid of the tiniest, baby spider! :)  My respect and admiration for spiders have quadrupled a 1000 times!