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Friday, November 20, 2015

Stories from the Farm - Morning Mist, Dew Drops, and Some Very Artistic Spiders

Every once in a while Mother Nature sends us a beautiful misty morning when the clouds appear to rise up from the ground and end just above the tree-tops. Gaggles of geese fly low, cloaked in mist, and the shrouded sun rises on a hazy horizon. On these mornings, literally everything is drenched in dew, beads lining each blade of grass; each flower petal, stamen and pistil; and each little insect leg and antenna.

These mornings don't seem to come often.* This year there were two of them.

One such morning came for me in the early spring. The winter had been hard and very cold, but on the morning of April 17th, the world was newly green and blooming in the sun-kissed mist. I grabbed my camera to look for beaded spider webs and other wonders and was rewarded with the following pictures:

Magnolias in the mist

Morning dew and mist

Pasture through the mist

Reflecting dew drops on lily leaves and spider web

Another such morning came just this past September 12th. As the winter of 2015 had been unusually cold, so had the summer of 2015 been unusually wet. When the calendar reached August, I began to notice a predominance of spiderwebs in the yard. Actually I couldn't help but notice because I was always walking into them and brushing them out of my face and hair. =:o They would stretch from the tree branches all the way down to the ground and from the clothesline clear over to the flower beds that hug the summer kitchen. They adorned all the shrubs and bushes. On a sunny day I couldn't walk outside without unintentionally walking through a spider web! So when I awoke on this misty September morning, I grabbed my camera and went outside hoping to find spiderwebs bejeweled in dew. I was not disappointed. Our yard was literally decked out in spiderwebs that morning, especially along the shrubbery and the chicken run. I decided we'd been blessed with some very artistic spiders! I will end this post with a few samples from this once-in-a-lifetime misty-morning exhibit:

Ornate web



Note the near-by tree reflected upside down in every dew drop

Web heavy with dew

Webs adorning the pasture gate as Annie wakes up

Sun-kissed web

Sparkly web

Funnel webs adorning the hedges

Web in the chicken wire

Traditional Halloween web
There were actually many more beautiful webs (and photos which I hope to eventually display in a gallery at my photography website).

Happy shutterbugging!

JuneBug

*addendum Jan. 18, 2016: When a heavy mist occurs on a winter morning, it produces hoar frost (defined by Google as "a grayish-white crystalline deposit of frozen water vapor formed in clear still weather on vegetation, fences, etc."). Like the dew described above, hoar frost is unusually thick; whenever it adorns the landscape, it produces a spectacular view. Sadly (for the topic of my article, at least) spiders don't usually build webs at that time of year. ;)


Hoar frosted morn

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