Tales from the Gap - The Black Widow and the Regal

Fort Indiantown Gap Military Reservation is a National Guard training center nestled in central Pennsylvania.  It blankets Blue Mountain, which marks the boundary between the Great Appalachian Valley and the main Ridge-and-valley Appalachians, and drapes out into the valleys east of the ridge. It has been used as training grounds for U.S. troops since 1933.  The land here is battered in some place and pristine in others, with spring-fed streams, dense mountainside woods, timber rattlesnakes, and a rare and beautiful butterfly called the Regal Fritillary.   

Barb marking a Regal Fritillary - nice tat.

I was once a zoologist with The Nature Conservancy and was blessed to have spent several years learning about this magnificent creature.  Five summers in temperatures sometimes over 100 degrees were devoted to sprinting through fields, tripping over hidden tank ruts, and dodging troops playing war games. All done with the goal of catching as many butterflies as possible and carefully writing a number on their wings so we could estimate how many there were and how far they flew.

I had been chasing and marking Regals all morning and as I made my way down a dusty tank trail, I noticed something flapping about in a clump of tall grass.  Upon closer inspection, the cause of the struggle became obvious – it was a Regal Fritillary caught in a spider web unfamiliar to me.  The fine strands seemed to be placed haphazardly between the blades of grass, creating a complex maze of silk.  As he continued to struggle to free the one wing that was stuck to the web, out from the deep, dark depths of the grass emerged a large female Black Widow Spider.  Spider paused and waited.  When Regal tired and could no longer flap his wings, Spider moved in and attached the tip of a second wing to her web, then calmly retreated back into the grass. 

For the next half hour, Regal gallantly attempted to free himself.   But after about 15 minutes, his movements would cease and out Spider would come, attaching another wing to her delicate web.  When at last all four wings were secured and he could no longer move, the Spider delivered a paralyzing bite to the underside of his body.  She then, quite literally, rolled him up into a cigar-shaped bundle, starting at the tip of his wing.  Once he was neatly packaged, she carried Regal down into the darkness of the grass.  I returned to her web daily for the next week but never saw Spider or Regal again.  The web? It vanished, too. 

It was an odd feeling, watching this drama of nature unfold.  Here was a butterfly so rare it was being considered for listing as an endangered species.  Here was a butterfly that I had held in my hand only weeks earlier.  Yet the Black Widow spider didn’t care - she was hungry.  Through this small window, Nature doesn’t recognize rarity – a meal is a meal, plain and simple. But in the grand scheme of things, rarity causes shifts in our world, some we can see and some we can’t.  Shifts in the food chain.  Shifts in processes.  Shifts in quality of life. What will our world be like without the Polar Bears and Seals when the ice caps are gone? What did we lose when the Passenger Pigeons no longer graced the skies?  I watch the clouds of Red-winged Blackbirds in the fall and can only imagine.

There is an Indigenous teaching that says what we do the Earth we do to ourselves. Something to think about.