Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [87]
Spiders are fortunately not alive in my winter cabin. Here is “Charlotte” dead and shriveled on a beam, next to her eggs, which do survive.
I had over the winter opened the bedroom window on numerous occasions to then brush them off the panes and the walls and throw them out by the hundreds. Still there were always plenty left at night congregating on the reading lamp. After we shut it off, the bugs then settled into our beds. Being dehydrated by the dry indoors, they not infrequently tried to crawl into our eyes at night, looking to suck up some of our moisture or to nip at our skin. By Easter, they started to come out of hibernation in force. We then had an infestation by the thousands, and as a last resort my wife Rachel tried to vacuum them up with a Dustbuster. Like riled-up skunks, they released their toxic chemical defensive secretions. Rachel is a biologist and the paragon of tolerance toward creatures. She is enthusiastic when the kids bring in spiders, earthworms, slugs, millipedes, sow bugs, and centipedes. But by April 2001, after another go at them with the Dustbuster, she declared Harmonia axyridis “disgusting.” I didn’t argue.
My grudging tolerance for the beetles stems mostly from their predatory habits. In addition to pecan aphids, the multicolored Asian ladybugs and their larvae feed on plant-sucking insects such as the woolly adelgid, which is decimating hemlock stands from Virginia to New England. Over its lifetime, a single multicolored Asian ladybug can devour an estimated 600 to 1, 200 aphids. In the 1960s the adelgid, too, was introduced from Asia (although it arrived inadvertently, probably on a nursery plant). Twenty years later it had become a serious problem. A hemlock tree attacked by adelgids invariably dies. So far, I have not had a problem with adelgids on my hemlocks.
The third insect species that is a regular if not abundant visitor is the green lacewing (family Chrysopidae). The light, bright green of the lacewing extends to its four large wings, delicate membranes stretched between a network of veins. Lacewings have a certain aura. But this is lost on aphids. Lacewing adults as well as their larvae, commonly called aphid lions, are ferocious predators like their relatives the antlions, whose larvae build deadly sand traps that capture ants. In contrast to all of the other house and cabin winter crowd, I seldom find more than a half dozen, but I commonly see them (unlike any of the other cabin occupants) under loose, dry bark of trees in the winter woods. They are rare enough guests in the cabin to be a treat.
Some deliberately bring houseguests into their dwellings for the winter. Our son Eliot and I found some tiny pale yellow ants overwintering in nest chambers under stones. In these chambers, attached to roots and rocks, we saw chalk-white blobs that, on close inspection, revealed themselves as aphids. Of course these aphids, close relatives of the dreaded adelgids, are there because they make themselves useful (to ants). They secrete sweet honeydew in the summer when the ants put them back out to pasture. And when they have finished milking them of honeydew in the fall, they tuck them safely back underground for winter storage into their chambers where we found them. They perch there all winter without, most likely, ever moving and being a nuisance.
The diversity and abundance of winter wildlife in my cabin is not necessarily enviable. Anyone can be similarly blessed. By allowing a few openings, I now play host to the good, the bad, the beautiful, and sometimes to the useful.
17
OF BATS AND BUTTERFLIES AND COLD STORAGE
One of my fondest childhood memories is of the bats on summer evenings. As reliable as the swallows in the barn and the bobolinks in the hayfields,