"Whatever" Wednesday - The Spider Edition

Welcome!   - Tuesday bowling scores this week: 129-116-150 Not a good week.

Just a "Warning" before I get started on this post.  If you hate spiders do not view this post. 

Here is how this all got started....

One night I'm looking out our side window over at my mom's porch to see if the stray cat we feed is done eating yet.  We named him "Blondie" before we discovered that he was a male cat so the name has just stuck.  He's a "feral" type cat as you can't get very close to him before he runs.  I managed to get a picture of him one night out the window so you can see why we call him Blondie.

Anyway this particular night I notice that he seemed to be playing with something on my mom's porch.  I start wondering if he's caught a moth or a mouse so I headed outside to find out what it was.  Of course, Blondie runs and hides under my husband's truck.

I finally discover what he was batting around and playing with.  Turns out he had found this,

on my mom's porch.  I didn't want this poor bug to get eaten by the cat so I rescued it and after taking a couple of pictures inside the house I relocated the Preying Mantis

on one of my roses.  That's were we discovered this....okay now this is where if you have Arachnophobia you look away.

After taking these photo's I set the spider free.  You will notice it's missing one leg which accidentally got pulled off when my daughter was trying to get the spider into the container.  I uploaded these photo's on Bug Guide and was told this was most likely a, Cat-Faced Orb Weaver (probably a female).  If you look closely the two humps on it's back resemble the ears of a cat and the white line is the cats nose and there are two indentations that look like cats eyes as well.  That's where it gets the name.

We nicknamed her, "Orbie"

I put this spider on my Azalea bush where she spent one day hiding before climbing up into the top corner of our house.  Below are a more shots of her.

This shot and the next one were taken on the Azalea bush before she moved to the upper corner of our house.

Here you can see her spinning her web in the upper corner of our house.  She would spend all day curled up under the roof ledge and them come out at night and hang down off her web on a single strand.  One night while trying to take pictures of her with Coleen holding the flashlight on her she came all the way down the web, wandered around in my flowers for a few seconds and then zipped back up the web so fast it was hard to believe.  She spent about a week in that spot and then one night she moved and we couldn't find her.  My daughter discovered hanging off the edge of our recycle bin.  I took this shot and it was featured in the Scavenger Hunt this past Sunday.

I didn't want the spider to get hurt and the Recycle Bin just wasn't the place for her to stay so I moved her back to the front of the house. 

She stayed one day there and we thought she had disappeared because we couldn't find her again. 

Then that nnight she came up out of the flower bed onto the living room window and I took this photo of her. 

Yes, I know our windows are really dirty!

Sadly this is the last photo I was able to take of her.  She crawled off the window onto our drain spot on the side of the house and hasn't been seen since.  -  We spent about 19 days watching this spider and let me tell you normally I am scared to death of spiders.  I hate the small ones and those jumping spiders but for some reason I found this one very fascinating and am so glad that I was able to get pictures of her.

I hope you have enjoyed them too.