I’ve had a lovely spider hanging about my back deck lately.

I confess that I don’t know very much about spiders (other than that I don’t like walking into their webs or being surprised by them), but I believe this beauty is an orb weaver. Her appearance matched the description provided by Google for this type of spider, as did her wagon-wheeled web.

I also discovered, again courtesy of Google, that many orb weavers tear down their webs and rebuild them each day, sometimes eating the silk threads to recycle them. Isn’t that cool! It also explains why I kept finding her in different places.

I was going to name her Charlotte, after the well-known heroine of my favorite childhood book, but I was afraid I might need to permanently persuade her to leave if she kept blocking the view of my camera lens…so…I opted to call her Charlie instead. That way, if worst came to worst, I wouldn’t have the weight of doing away with Charlotte on my conscious!

Hopefully she will hang about and eat unsuspecting insects like mosquitoes and maybe give me a few more chances to snap some spider shots.