Living up here on a small island near the Canadian border we've got a lot of critters. A couple of weeks ago we had a pair of big Owls move in and start wiping out the big Red Squirrels in our Maple trees. They were pretty chatty, and their screech sounded like Casper The Ghost was living in our yard.
In Spring we battle Ants which swarm into our place. In Fall, we have to deal with the Spiders.
These are not the little spiders that hang out in a web in the corner. These are "Hobo Spiders", which are the most aggressive and self-aware spiders I have seen in the Pacific Northwest. According to Wikipedia, the Hobo's first came into the country before the 1930's in shipments from Europe to Seattle. They have since expanded their territory to Oregon and Idaho.
I don't know if they are just maturing in the Fall and are becoming more visible, or if they enter the house as the cool wet weather sets in.
These guys are big and ugly. When I catch one trapped in a sink, they fight back as you try to crush them and flush them down the drain. If they are in open ground, they see you coming for them and they run like hell for cover.
The problem is, they have a nasty bite:
I know quite a few people who have had to go on antibiotics after they have been bitten. Often, a small infection starts and they don't know why. After a visit to the Doctor, toxicology results say it was a spider bite. If not treated it can turn into flesh-eating disease. The people I know ended up with staph infections, suggesting it's not just venom but nasty bacteria that goes along with the bite.
A teacher at the High School told me he saw a student with a huge wad of gauze crammed into a wound on his side. The kid said he had killed a large Hobo spider but never realized he had been bitten. At the Doctor's office, the wound was cleaned out. The Doctor pulled a bunch of spider eggs out of the kid's wound. That's right, the spider had laid eggs in the kid, and they were about to hatch.
Lately in my war against the Hobo's I've been having some pretty close contact. My wife was cooking recently and I was sitting in a chair reading. I felt something crawling on my arm, and sure enough, it was a big Hobo spider. I calmly got up and asked my wife to step away from the sink. I shook it off in the sink, took a fork and we did battle as I forced it down the drain with hot water and fork. My wife freaked out. Then, the other day I opened an upper cupboard to pull out some Tea. There was a huge Hobo staring right at me. Before it could retreat to hide, I grabbed one of it's legs and flung it into the sink, once again to battle it with fork and hot water. I mean, these things really fight back.
Generally, they only appear to bite when they are accidentally threatened, like if you sit on one or it happens to be in your shoe or pant-leg when you are getting dressed. Oh joy. I've been shaking out my clothes before I get dressed.
--So today, I'm opening up the comments section for other peoples stories of creepy-crawlers. Spiders, Scorpions, Vampire Bats... What's your story?
