Smudge

Smudge

12 October 2025

Sic transit gloria aranearum.

The spiders come back to the window in late summer. The window is long and tall, facing south. From inside, there are lights at night because people work late in this building. The light brings the insects. The insects bring the spiders. The spiders bring me to the window.

It's mostly one species that moves in: Larinioides sclopetarius, the "gray cross spider" or "bridge spider." They're fond of man-made structures. There are large females, little leggy males, and rotund juveniles tucked into the seams, wandering about on the window, or hanging in their 2-foot-wide orb webs.

Larinioides sclopetarius adult female

I was perusing the population on September 10 when I noticed someone different: a Neoscona crucifera, a "spotted orb weaver." These are my favorite spiders to photograph at night because they're big, and each one is slightly different, especially noticeable with a flash camera. During the day, it's another matter. Normally nocturnal, females spend daylight hours in their webs toward the end of their lives, after they've mated and are incubating eggs to lay. They must sense air currents or other vibrations when I try to get close, because they always scurry up into their corner hideout.

At the window, it was different. The spider was in her web, about a foot away from the thick glass, and she didn't run when I got close.

I tried to get pictures with my phone. The reflections from inside and out played havoc with the focus. Compared to what I'm accustomed to with my DSLR and manual macro lens at night, this was very frustrating. The best I could do was position her against the sky and let my phone focus on the silhouette.

From down the hall, she looked like a blob of dirt on the window. Up close, I couldn't get her in focus.

That her web swayed in the breeze did not help at all.

I named her Smudge.

My office companion and fellow technician, CJ, who knows about my nerdy spider obsession, had been sending me photos of spiders she'd seen in her yard. Now we had an unwitting subject in front of us.

She would spend the morning on her web. When the sun got too bright mid-afternoon, she'd hide in a crease of the eave, with two feet in contact with her web, should some juicy prey happen by.

I didn't have the patience or the time to stand at the window and take dozens of photos in the hopes that one would be in focus. CJ, in a few spare minutes, managed two.

In frustration, I downloaded the Halide app, which solves the iPhone macro depth of field focus problem with a focus loupe and a slider. It took some getting used to, but once I figured it out, it was all Smudge all the time.

Leaving me desk to go into the lab, I would stop by the window first. Leaving the lab to go to my desk, I would stop by the window on the way. With the light changing as the sun moved westward, there was ample opportunity to photograph her at different angles.

The Neoscona crucifera in my yard, and there were plenty, appearing one at a time starting in early July, had all disappeared by September 4. My naturalist friend in Massachusetts had one in her yard we'd named Harriet. CJ now had two in her yard: Melissa and Iris.

They were all entered into our Last Spider Hanging contest, Neoscona crucifera division. It was all a bunch of harmless fun, of course, but we were serious. We checked in on the contestants daily, making note of when one had disappeared.

Harriet vanished first. Then Melissa went missing. We thoguht we were down to two when, on September 18, an orange contestant appeared at a front corner of my house.

One Night Stand

The next night, she was gone, and we were back to Smudge and Iris.

On September 26, I uploaded a Smudge gallery to iNaturalist.

On September 27, Iris was gone. Smudge was the winner.

We were still checking in on Smudge on September 30. By now, she'd outlasted my longest-surviving yard Neoscona crucifera (Peachy, in 2022), by 12 days.

She spent the day in her hideout.

I would be away from the lab on October 1, taking a vacation day to blow glass in a Philadelphia studio. "Send me an update," I told CJ. 

When I checked my phone mid-day on October 1, there was a message: "Did smudge go glass blowing with you?"

20 days was a good run, espeically for one that showed up so late in the season. The Neoscona crucifera in my yard had been long gone by the time Smudge came around. I'd found my first, Apricot, on July 1. She was young, and moved on after 26 days.

Apricot in the rain

Goldenrod (because that's the plant she was tethered to when I found her) was around for 48 days, although she went missing for a handful of nights when she moved from her redbud leaf hideout to a butterfly bush a few yards away. The last time I saw her, she was hiding in her dead flower, her legs sticking out, in the early evening. When I came back three hours later, she and her web were gone.

Goldenrod in her web

Goldenrod

Way Up in a Tree arrived on August 12. She was so high up that my lantern and flash barely illuminated her enough for my marco lens to find her.

Way Up in a Tree

The next night, she built her web at eye level and let me get very close from both sides of her web. The following night, she had two suitors at once.

Way Up in a Tree

Way Up in a Tree with her first boyfriend

She stuck around for another 12 days.

Another one first showed up hanging in a bed of black-eyed Susans in late July. She disappeared for a while, and I spotted her again where the patio joins the west side of the house. She was gone again until she built a web across the screen door on the east side of the patio. That night, I nearly walked into her web. I kept the door locked after that and used the one on the opposite side until she disappeared.

Susan

I never see them leave. One late summer evening they're in their webs or their hideouts, and the next they're gone. They must lay their eggs somewhere and die.

It was the same with Smudge.

We still went to the window at work, though. There were dozens of Larinioides sclopetarius milling about. Six days after Smudge had disappeared, October 6, I noticed something different among the usual crowd. There was a spider huddled in the eaves. I used my camera for a closer look.

This wasn't a L. sclopetarius. It had red femurs. Neoscona. Red femurs, brownish body tending towards purple.

Smudge!

"CJ! It's Smudge!"

Something didn't look right, though. "She looks deflated," I said. She must have laid her eggs.

Smudge with a young L. sclopetarius behind her

Half an hour later, she'd changed position, and did not look any better. Her legs were all wrong.

I told CJ, "I think she's dying."

"Noooooo!"

I explained how spiders use hydraulic pressure to straighten their legs, and that when the pressure is released, the legs curl in. This was happening to Smudge.

By mid-afternoon, she was up against the eave, her legs more retracted than before.

I had a brief conversation with one of our lab's post-docs who was sitting with her late lunch and her computer at the window. Behind her, smudge dangled.

By 5:00 she was dead, twisting about in the breeze, still attached to her line of silk.

I found her body the next morning. It had finally fallen to the ledge overnight. There she lay, upside-down. I showed CJ. 

"Noooooo!"

There she rested, among fly carcasses and spider poop.

CJ kept going to the window. "She moved!"

"That was the wind," I said.

The post-doc came by as we were checking in on the corpse a few days later. "What are you looking at?"

"A dead spider," I said.

"Named Smudge," CJ chimed in.

"You named her? Oh god."

And on the ledge her body remained for the rest of the week. "Still dead," I'd remind CJ.

We're at the edge of an impending Nor'easter as I write this. The wind is gusting at 30 miles per hour. Will it be enough to send Smudge down to the soil below? Will we see her babies hatch from the eave? Or will they emerge and disperse at night, away from the prying eyes of two scientists who really should be getting back to work?