I’ve never been an arachnophobe — I save my fear and loathing for cockroaches and waterbugs — but I’ve also never considered them a potential hobby. Neither did Adam Roy; at least, not at first. But now? Now he’s a committed spider spier, logging his sightings and making us all think a little differently about our eight-legged neighbors.
At night, a fat-bodied giant wetland wolf spider emerged from a crack between the concrete front step and wall to hunt, while American grass spiders crawled out from behind the shutters and took position in the middle of their funnel-shaped webs, their striped cephalothoraxes making them look like eight-legged badgers. Elsewhere, false widows and common house spiders built their tangled webs in any corner they could find. I dutifully logged every new sighting in my journal, jotting down the species, date, place, and notes in a Google doc.
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