why the September spiders are a week early

Picture from Damian Barr's tweet - I like the nice touch of the wine listing.

I usually associate September with indoor spiders. Sure, there might be one or two tiny ones that get inside before that, but September brings out the big ones.

You know the kind of thing. You can hear them as they walk across the floor. They have a surprising turn of acceleration too, and although large, can squinch down small at the approach of a glass tumbler in which they can be captured.

It's strange too. In the garage, there are usually a whole range of spiders which only very occasionally do anything to startle. We keep a kind of balanced equilibrium there between two-legged and eight legged creatures.

Indoors is a whole different thing. It's usually my job to spot a spider and capture it without alerting anyone else. If I do there's a kind of short-term mayhem until the beastie is contained and then expelled.

I usually throw them into a bush or small tree near to the front door, but in the case of the recent large ones, I've taken them to the bottom of the back garden and released them far enough away to give them a completely different playground.

So why, this year, are they a week or two early?

My sceptical side would say that the media needs a story to fill a quarter page and spiders are a safe bet.

That would be so if I hadn't also seen two early monster arachnids indoors here over the last week or so. Maybe they have heard that the academic terms have been brought forward?

This one from a tweet by Lewis Gibbs - no wine listing on this picture

Of course, the ones I've evicted were AT LEAST as big as the ones in the pictures.

Oh yes.