This is half-pie.

And so on to today’s spider-of-the-day.

Bella found this one for me after tea: breathless after running inside: “Come Dad! Come see the yellow spider I found!”.

She’d seen it – how, I don’t know – down the bank on a clover flower, a remnant of many that I’d mowed earlier in the day with the line trimmer. I took it off the clover and put it onto the sunlit path for a little photoshoot. Yeah baby, looking great!

It was tiny, about 5 mm long, and looked more yellow to the eye than this photo would suggest:

Unfortunately I could not get a better photo, partly because it was too small and therefore a little beyond the capabilities of me or my equipment, and partly because the girls, crowding around, were getting in the way of the fading sunlight. [Not that I minded that much.]

And then Rosa, trying to get the spider to hop onto her finger, ended up putting her finger more or less on top of it by accident. Somehow it escaped injury and disappeared into a crack in the concrete. The photoshoot was over. The star had departed.

Later, consulting my spider book, it looks like Bella had found a spider belonging to genus Diaea, a crab spider. They are apparently very common, but are not often seen on account of them being so small and cryptic. There’s some better photos of these on Flickr.

So there you go.