Tarantulas and Turkeys!

The other day I was in Sunol Regional Wilderness, my hopes of seeing wildlife not particularly high and it being a tad warm for my liking, when suddenly I spied some turkeys. Now, back in my beloved Occoquan Bay NWR in Virginia, it wasn’t super easy to get a photo of the shy turkeys as they liked to hide in the wooded areas, but around here turkeys seem a little more open. In fact, there was a flock of them in the middle of the street in my neighborhood a couple of days ago; they surrounded my car, which was a bit…surprising. Nonetheless, I’m excited by just about all animals, especially here in California where I’m finding it tough to see wildlife in the quantities I did at Occoquan Bay, so I quickly switched to my telephoto lens and was delightedly snapping photos of the turkeys …

… when I happened to look at the ground near my feet and saw a tarantula wandering around!

That was rather overwhelming: I was all “Turkeys! Tarantula! TURKEYS! TARANTULA!” and couldn’t figure out where to point my camera! The tarantula ultimately won, though, because I’ve never seen a tarantula in the wild before, plus he was pretty fascinating. So I ended up switching back to my smaller lens and getting right into his face, lamenting the fact I hadn’t brought my macro lens so I could get REALLY close to him. He paid absolutely no attention to me and just kept crawling closer to me, so I had to keep backing up to stay out of his way.

I’ve always liked spiders. One day in Virginia a pest control person appeared on my doorstep and was trying to convince me to spray poison all over my yard. I said, no way, we have tons of wildlife here and I don’t want to endanger them. He tried to say it was safe for wildlife but I wasn’t having it. So then he persisted in trying to get me to treat my basement to kill spiders and other pests and I said, “why in the world would I do that? I LIKE spiders,” and he looked at me like I had eight legs. I don’t understand spider-hate. I’ve even trained Mark to like small spiders (he used to hate them) and he won’t kill them either – although sometimes our cats like to torture them. Anyway, although I like spiders enough to let them live in my house, I’ve never considered myself a spider fanatic or anything, but for some reason, I REALLY liked that tarantula. I was just really tickled to meet him, and I went home elated.

Lots of things about this transition to the West Coast have been difficult, but when I see wildlife, especially new species I haven’t seen or photographed before, my mood just skyrockets. With the days growing shorter, I need to start forcing myself to stop working early enough I get can out and be in nature every day. It’s good for my sanity and my soul.