Enjoy (sort of) the Orb Weaver in August

Here you are enjoying your late summer walk through the woods when, eww, you walk right into a spider web.

The web is everywhere! Is the spider on you? Yuck!

It’s not your imagination that spider webs are everywhere in August into September and even October if the weather is warm. That’s the time when many spiders weave their webs, especially the large Orb Weaver, a spider of extraordinary art and grace.

Their complicated, many-layer webs are a work to behold. The spiders themselves are not dangerous, and they won’t bite you. The spiders can be pretty brave. It’s a game for country children to find Orb Weaver on the web and tap his yellow back, making him bounce on the web.

The webs can sometimes be enormous, more than three feet in diameter, yet weirdly invisible. To best admire the web, take a hike after a rain, and you’ll see the droplets glistening on the complicated web. The rain brings out vegetation and insects, and the Orb Weavers will be out in force, spinning to net their prey.

Orb Weavers are part of the Araneidae family, a large group of spiders with many colors and shapes. The daytime Orbs are brightly colored with orange or yellow patterns on black. The spiders you see weaving their webs in the fall are females.

The spokes of the web are roads for the spider to crawl on, but the loops of the web are covered in a sticky substance that is perfect for catching insects. It can also catch small birds. Gardeners have seen birds the size of sparrows caught haplessly in the Orb Weavers web.