Disclaimer: The following may give you the heebie jeebies. (It certainly freaked me out)
It must be the year for spiders. They are everywhere!! I only ever had one golden orb spider in my chook pen, but today I counted 14 big fat ones. There were two in this corner and the blossom from the flowering gums nearby had been caught in their webs. Actually looked really cool.
But everytime I went in there to get eggs or water the trees I hated knowing they were above my head. I think I would scream my guts out if one ever dropped to my head or shoulder. (Probably never would have happened but I wasn’t going to take the chance.) We don’t like to put any sprays near our fruit so I found the biggest stick I could…believe me it was MASSIVE. It had a V at the end and I used it to scoop through the web and catch the spider. Yeah, I was totally creeped out whilst doing this.
But I wasn’t about to put my foot anywhere near these huge things. Double yuck. So I fed them to my chooks instead. Needless to say they love me for the yummy feed. They were fighting over them. Some of the smarter chooks started following me around as I moved to each new web and were after it the moment I brought the stick down. Gross! Now that my enclosure is now spider free I feel much better….well maybe after a long shower. The sooner I can’t feel those thick sticky spider webs the better. Uugh. A gross yucky job, but someone had to do it. 🙁
PS. Sorry if i’ve left you a bit jumpy and feeling yuck…but I did warn you. 🙂