Bonding With Spiders
Twenty three years later, while filming at Imire Game Reserve in Zimbabwe with Tony Allen and Nigel Tucker, holes in the ground around our living quarters jogged my memory of bushbaby nights 800 km away to the south. Demonstrating the art of fishing for baboon spiders, which had everyone doing it for days, there emerged just one little difference between here and South Africa. It was still cold at night but because we were staying in a tourist lodge, there were lights along the paths to the rondavels where we slept. It seemed that all the winged and walking creepy-crawlies of Imire were attracted to these pools of brilliance. So, too, were their predators, the bats and the baboon spiders, the latter, no doubt, warmed by the heat of the bulbs whose brightness they tolerated in return for such an ample supply of food. Somehow, though, we had to deter these spiders from getting into our bedrooms. Early each evening we sprayed insect repellent round our shuttered doors and windows and not a single spider crossed the threshold.
One evening at Imire, the baboon spiders more or less under control, I went into Tony’s room to ask for the air-freight details for his filming gear. The generator in the lodge had just gone down and the room was dimly lit by candles. Lazing on his bed after a long day filming buffaloes, Tony gestured towards a mound of equipment in the corner where I would find the details on the labels attached to the cases. In the shadowy, flickering light – or, more accurately, the shadowy, flickering dark – I leaned over and groped around in search of one of the labels. I grasped a living creature. Not a spider, but the smooth, sinuously twisting body of a snake. Had it been a baboon spider, I might have died from shock even if it hadn’t bitten me. Being a snake – although it could easily have been one of the highly-poisonous boomslangs that lived in the tree canopy above our thatched roofs – it filled me with alarm, but not total dread. I still pulled back with a startled cry. Tony grabbed his torch and shone it beyond the cases. Firmly stuck to a pile of discarded gaffer tape was a metre-long snake. It had evidently been there for some time because it was exhausted by its efforts to escape. It was identified by the locals as a slightly venomous rat snake, a convenient term that seems to cover many nondescript snakes that come into people’s homes all over the world to feed on their resident rodents. Later that evening, I made the mistake of telling Tony that I was lucky not to have been bitten. He was not sympathetic. The snake - had I forgotten already? - was actually in his room and, but for the gaffer tape, might have ended up in his bed.
Living through such memorable encounters is an occupational hazard for people working with wildlife. Studying birds in Australia in 1968, I often slept outside my stuffy tent in the fresh air. My camp bed had uprights at each corner, to which a mosquito net could be attached. Each morning, I would crawl out of the side and tuck the net back under the thin mattress, guaranteeing that nothing could get in during the day. One night, though, as I lay in bed looking up at the brilliant night sky, I noticed the shape of a large spider at the far corner above my right foot. I was not at all bothered by its presence on top of the mosquito net and was too tired and comfortable to get up and look any closer. I drifted off into my usual deep bush sleep.
In the morning, with the first wash of dawn giving shape to trees, tents and Land Rovers, the spider was still there, in exactly the same position. I lay looking at it, waking slowly, and as its body and legs came into focus, I realized that it was in fact on the inside of the netting. I went cold, not from worry over what it might do next but from realizing that I had left myself vulnerable by falling asleep. For all I knew, it had walked all over me, returning to its own little corner to sleep out the approaching day. Sliding carefully out of the head-end of my camp bed, I tied the netting with string as tightly as I could below the spider, so that it was trapped. I then undid the net from its poles and removed my unwelcome guest to a very safe distance.
A few weeks later, on the same expedition, I went to unscrew the yellow lid on one of our black water-containers. Under the flickering flames of a night fire, images are not as clear as they are during the day, so it wasn’t until my hand was about to make contact with the lid that I realized that a large spider was sitting on it, matching its color almost perfectly. At the last minute, it raised and spread its front legs, bending back its head and thorax to expose its fangs as a warning. The unexpectedness of the moment made me jump back.
Arachnid Anatomy Source: The Spider Book (1912, 1920) by John Henry Comstock Diagram of the internal anatomy of a two-lunged spider
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