Haiku: Obstinate Orb Weaver

It’s orb weaver time of year. Throughout the pastures, the industrious creatures have been at work, draping their webs between stalks of grass. Wet with morning dew, they’re stunning to behold. I try my best to avoid damaging those webs as I move through, but, sometimes, a spider will decide to make a web in a place where it can’t be – like atop the wire “cage” that secures the ramp from the chicken coop – and I have to ruin the spider’s masterpiece.

More often than not, I’m unintentionally wrecking webs with my face: they’re very difficult to see when they’re under large trees, and the orb weavers like to spin their immense webs with incredibly long “guy wires” anchoring them between the tree branches and the ground. These extra long threads are practically impossible to see, so I end up with the filaments in across my face. It’s not pleasant. Sometimes, too, a spider comes along with the filament, and drops down from the brim of my hat on a thread, as if to say “hello”.

But back to the chicken coop orb weaver: she’s a big girl, plump, very lovely. Each morning, she’s sitting in her web, which she’s built atop and across a wire “door” of sorts (it secures the top of the wire enclosure for the ramp, keeping the chickens safe while they go in and out of the coop). There’s no way for me to open the pop door without opening the top of the wire ramp cage, so that means that, each morning, I destroy the spider’s amazing web.

I’ve tried explaining to her that if she just moved her webs to the side of the coop (or, really, any other place other than the top of the ramp cage), I would leave her be to catch the flies and other prey her web is so cleverly designed to trap. I applaud the spiders for catching those flies! But, so far, my pleas have fallen on deaf ears: each day, she’s made her web in the same place.

Today, after I unmoored her web, she slowly climbed up to the edge of the metal roof of the coop and was still for a few moments, as if she was surveying the damage and contemplating her next move.

She then disappeared into a nook under the roof, a cozy tunnel that I suspect serves as her nighttime abode.

I hope that, tomorrow, she will have spun her web in a place that allows me to access the pop door without interfering with her work…and I will admire her fine handicraft, as I do each day.

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