So Ethel calls me at work and tells me that we've got a visitor on the back porch:

                       


It was good news, as we hadn't seen many tarantulas since we moved to the Phoenix area.

Sometime in the late summer, the tarantulas come out and - well, look for other tarantulas. When we lived on the edge of Tucson back in the mid 90's, we got to see these social events - they would all come out and walk around for a few days, until everybody had found a sweetie, and then they would pair up and head off for their little tarantula-burrows, and they'd mate, and the female would kill and eat the male. Tarantulas don't have divorce lawyers, because tarantulas don't NEED divorce lawyers.

( According to Wikipedia, the male rarely actually "becomes a meal", but I suspect that this has more to do with the female sobering up and looking at the male and saying "What? I brought HIM home? No WAY I'm eating that!" and tossing the carcass outside).

But living in Anthem, we never got to see any tarantulas; I suspect that Del Webb, the contractor who built the town, decided early on that the Californians who were their target demographic wouldn't really enjoy having tarantulas come out and parade around the town for several days, so they must have found some way to get rid of them; perhaps just razing the top several inches of topsoil for many square miles might do it.

But now we live in New River, and we're just a short hop from the Tonto National Forest, so I've been looking forward to Tarantula Courting Season. BTW - tarantulas are NOT really dangerous to humans; their toxins aren't deadly (the main problem is in bites getting infected). They do, however, have "urticating hairs on their abdomen" that can really irritate your eyeballs if they zap you, so never look a tarantula in the navel if you can help it.

It's so nice, seeing them out wandering around - they don't move very fast, really (I suppose that they are all acting cool and nonchalant, in order to impress the gender-opposite tarantulas) and they just seem to be "strolling" through the neighborhood.

So I was really looking forward to seeing our lawn covered with hairy spiders, and assumed when Ethel told me that we had a hairy gent on the back porch that it was that time of year.

When I got home, though, Ethel said "He's just sitting there - not doing anything". Later she said that he had moved around, but that he never moved when she was looking.

It was a while after this before we figured out that he was, well, dead, and that the "movement" was the wind blowing him around in little circles in the corner of our back porch.

So now we'll have to wait even longer until the little folks come out to visit.