152 FLYING SPIDERS. 
I do not know of any published account of similar flights of 
cobwebs in this country, but on almost any fine morning in sum- 
mer the grass and shrubs may be found covered with threads con- 
necting the extremities of the twigs and leaves in every direction, 
and floating horizontally from them sometimes to a distance of 
several yards. I have often seen the short grass in the Salem 
pasture so covered that every leaf seemed to have several threads 
passing from it. One morning in June, 1868, I noticed some little 
spiders about one tenth of an inch long rambling about on the top 
of a low fence partly shaded by horse-chestnuts and apple-trees. 
At intervals they would stop, raise the back part of their bodies, 
and straighten their legs until they stood on tip-toe in the ridicu- — 
lous position shown in the figure. (Fig. 43.) After a few sec- 
onds they would retake their customary position and travel on. 
I went to the same fence and watched them on several successive 
Fig. 43. mornings, and finally saw one, on the edge of the 
fence-cap, raise itself as in the figure and imme- 
diately after a thread extended upward from its 
spinners. In a few seconds the thread increased 
to nearly a yard in length, when spider and all 
rose slowly upward until the thread became en- 
tangled in the branches of the apple-tree above, 
which were already connected together by nu- 
merous threads and occupied by several spiders of the same kind. 
This took place soon after sunrise on a warm, and apparently per- 
fectly calm morning. 
At another time, on one of the first warm days in March, I saw 
a little crab-spider running about on the ends of a barberry bush 
and dropping from twig to twig until it hung from the most pro- 
jecting branch by a thread about a foot long. It swung back and 
forth for some minutes when a gust of wind blew it away 8° 
quickly that I could not follow it with my eyes. It had, however, 
spun a thread as it went which passed from the bush to a juniper 
about six feet off. 
Mr. R. P. Whitfield of Albany, N. Y., tells me that once when 
passing through a field of oat stubble on a warm day in autumn, 
he observed great numbers of threads floating upwards in the air, 
the lower extremity being attached to the upper ends of the stub- 
ble, and on examining some of the stalks he found numbers of 
small spiders busily running up and down them. When a suit- 
able place was found the spider would attach a thread to the 
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