PLUCKING PINHEAD-SIZE spiders out of leaf litter takes concentration, keen eyesight and favorable temperatures. If it’s too cold, the tiny creatures won’t move, Rod Crawford explains. And if they don’t move, you’ll never be able to spot them.
Conditions today are on the cusp, he warns me as he grabs damp duff from beneath a stand of alders and stuffs it into a garbage bag. The nastiest spring in a decade put Crawford behind schedule on spider-hunting trips, and even in mid-June, it’s still cool and drippy in this forest off the Mountain Loop Highway.
He spreads a cream-colored cloth over a bare patch of ground, then lowers himself onto the dirt. Recumbent, he tosses a few handfuls of duff into a sifter fashioned from a cat litter box with its bottom cut out and replaced by a screen. He shakes the pan, and debris rains down on the cloth.
The Burke Museum’s ‘spiderman’ searches high and low to find Washington’s arachnid species
Conditions today are on the cusp, he warns me as he grabs damp duff from beneath a stand of alders and stuffs it into a garbage bag. The nastiest spring in a decade put Crawford behind schedule on spider-hunting trips, and even in mid-June, it’s still cool and drippy in this forest off the Mountain Loop Highway.
He spreads a cream-colored cloth over a bare patch of ground, then lowers himself onto the dirt. Recumbent, he tosses a few handfuls of duff into a sifter fashioned from a cat litter box with its bottom cut out and replaced by a screen. He shakes the pan, and debris rains down on the cloth.
The Burke Museum’s ‘spiderman’ searches high and low to find Washington’s arachnid species