The Sunvisor and the Hitchhiker

Gen had a hilarious event yesterday. As she was driving full tilt on the highway, gaining maximum speed up the hill outside Wollongong, she pulled down the sun visor and a huge huntsman spider, the size of her hand, fell onto the dashboard with a loud thud. 

There it sat in front of her nose looking angrily at her. What to do? Nowhere to pull over on the narrow, busy motorway with other vehicles whizzing past, unaware of the life or death drama unfolding in front of Gen who froze in surprise and wondered if that rubbing on her leg was the spider, only to realise it was the ignition keys.

When she glanced up, the hitchhiker had disappeared deep within the campervan. Gen  had found a dead one on the campervan bed a few weeks before, so now we think there is a Big Spider family in there somewhere.Curiously, idle searching on Google reveals that these lovely huntsmen spiders love nothing better than to hang out behind sun visors and pop out to say hello when a visitor is least expected.

We love spiders, truly amazing wonders of nature, ranging from the cunningly shaped bird dropping spider to the net casting spider which does what its name says. 

We have the occasional redback and huntsman in the house, but Robert was putting his shoes on last week in the living room, when a black, elongated spider scuttled out from under the left shoe. Gen put a cup over it, dropped me off at the station, then returned to what she thought was a humdrum species of spider. 

Looking more closely, she had an inkling of something stirring in her memory about this type of spider with glistening black body and distinctive white tail. Sure enough, a quick identification parade with a pic of the spider posted to the arachnid forum on the Internet, revealed it was a white-tailed spider. As ever in Australia, it has a very poisonous bite, right up there it seems in intensity with the redback.