The Year of Spiders

This, it seems, is the Year of the Spiders. All Summer I've been greeted with these beautiful works of Nature as I stepped out my back door to go let out the chickens. This morning was particularly foggy and dewy so that the web showed up a bit in the picture. Look for the lacy web just to the right of the humming bird feeder. (Click on the picture to see a large version of it.) These huge, fat, brown, ugly spiders build these engineering marvels during the night; they are not there at dusk when I go to lock up my chickens, but they are there just after dawn when I go to let them out. This particular one, easily 3 or even 4 feet across, was up high enough that I could walk under it without disturbing it. Most of them are built right across my path, and I have to tear it down to go on. I don't know what kind of arachnids these things are, but some of them are big, fat, brown, and ugly; while some of them are black and orange or yellow striped and pretty. They are huge, whatever they are, and I'm glad they stay outside.