Tarantula Season

July 18, 2021

Howdy everybody,

Well, big news, we finally saw our first tarantula! I guess to be more specific, I'll say that I saw our first tarantula on the way back from feeding the horses on Friday night. The horses weren't at the feeders, as they have been busy being mobile lawn mowers for every waking hour of the day lately, so I just filled them up quickly and turned the buggy around to head back to the barn. About ten seconds later I noticed an enormous spider ambling across the road in front of me. Now, I say enormous, but by the looks of it and by the pictures that I have studied, I'm thinking this was a little, young one. I turned off the buggy and hopped out and got my phone ready to take pictures. First, I leaned over it and took some shots from above, but then I knelt down on the ground so that I could lay the phone on the ground in order to take some eye-level shots of it with the horizon in the background. At this point, it squared off with me and started rearing up to show me that it didn't want to be bothered. I wasn't to worried as they are not particularly aggressive and don't have mouths big enough to bite anything human-sized. They can flick their leg hairs at you, but I'm not sure that that would compare with a cougar attack or a snakebite. I watched it, mesmerized, for about five minutes, snapping up a bunch of pictures, but then decided to let it go and head on my way back in to the barn. Apparently, we're on an ancient migratory path for tarantulas and they always start congregating in the late summer and head up to the plains of southeastern Colorado to mate. Males work themselves up to this event over the course of a few years and typically don't survive very long once the mating is done. Females can live for a couple of decades. Yet another crazy critter that we have roaming the land out here with us!

Not to be outdone, last night when I was letting the dogs out for the last time before dark, I noticed Ela jump back from something that she was sniffing in the tall grass and immediately I thought that it was a snake. Sure enough, it was, but it was not anything that I could have even begun to imagine once I got up close to take a look at it. A garter snake, maybe three feet long and only two or three inches wide, was in the process of swallowing one of the gigantic bullfrogs that we have in the pond here. Normally, they swallow things headfirst to get ears and such to lay flat, but this frog was snagged by his back feet and both of his legs were in the snake's mouth. The bullfrog's eyes were still open, alive I thought at first, but later I think I determined that it was indeed dead at the time. In the end, when I checked this morning, the bullfrog was lying in the grass in the same spot with his two back legs partially digested, and the snake was nowhere to be seen. Assuming that it was able to get its jaws unhinged and that the frog wasn't hooked on its internal backwards-facing fangs designed to keep prey in place, the snake must have slithered away to sleep off what I can only imagine was a splitting headache...probably a youg'un still trying to figure it all out! So, so far we've seen a dead rattlesnake, a tiny ring snake, a decent-sized bull snake in the garden and now this garter snake. There are a fair amount of snakes out here, but nothing like the pit of asps that Indiana Jones hung over in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is how we imagined this place would be from 2000 miles away!

On the car front I've got them both just about spinning like tops. After securing the front passenger seat in the blue one, we've done more rides back and forth from Las Vegas in it and it's driving like a dream. I need to reattach the exhaust and muffler with some new rubber insulators, but otherwise it's in great shape. On the yellow one I finally put a new alternator belt on it, after loosening up the power steering pump to remove that belt and then cheating and cutting the AC belt that I couldn't even budge...my cars have AC, but you can barely tell the difference between when it's on and when it's not, so completely expendable. I got the new belt on but was having trouble tightening it until I finally realized over the weekend that I needed belts that had little teeth on the inside of them and not flat ones. Luckily, having two of the same vehicles, I can always compare one against the other to catch things like this, and in this instance I did. The alternator was charging and the water pump was pushing coolant around, but only with the pulleys clanking and shaking very loudly because the belt was too loose without those little teeth. Lesson learned, great experience to tear apart one of my cars a little bit and put it back together again, which, in the end, has only made me more eager to dive into the next big fix. A new belt has been ordered and is on its way!

Now for some shots of our crazy life out here on a ranch where the high plains pour themselves onto the southern Rockies! The first four shots are of my tarantula encounter: first an art piece that I made out of one of them; then one of him from above; next one of me lowering the camera to the ground; and finally one of him putting his dukes up when I put my camera right in front of him! Next, two shots from the fable of the hungry, little snake and the slow, fat frog. Then, a shot of the girls(minus Rui) running the fence line in Kim's backyard and checking out the view. Next, two shots of Erin out in the garden early in the morning seeing what it is willing to yield to her that day. Then, two shots of the jobsite where I work every day: first from higher up the hill where you can see the bigger mountains in the background; then a closeup of the trench that I was in on Friday cementing pvc conduits together for a future electrical line so that we could then fill the trench back in. Next, a shot of my boot while out feeding the horses...already well-worn after having them just six months! Then, two shots of Indian Paintbrushes, a flower we first discovered in the High Sierra of Yosemite when we were backpacking during our honeymoon...we're super excited to see them growing out here where we are now. Finally, two shots of some of the magnificent clouds that you see out here at high elevation: first with the table set for the horses whenever they eventually made their way back in to feed; and then a more detailed shot of the huge clouds towering over the ridge right behind us...amazing!

Take care, one and all, and see you soon,