Goodbye Tears

I am way overdue on some updates. We've moved twice and had another (human) baby since my last update. I've been meaning to get back over here, but it is hard to find time with two little humans under foot (plus I stay busy on my other blog). Spiders are so much easier! I did, however, get a little prod of inspiration this week. Stan Schultz, co-author of The Tarantula Keeper's Guide, emailed me requesting permission to link a couple of my photos from this blog. I was so excited and flattered! He was glad to inspire my return to the blog as well.

The photos he will be linking (on a care sheet on relative humidity with regard to tarantula care) were of silk turrets made by our Cobalt Blue (Haplopelma lividium), Tears. She turned out to be a he and passed away before our last move. He did stay hidden so much that we're not sure how long he was dead before we noticed. He was a gorgeous specimen.

And so, in honor of Tears, and perhaps a new tradition for this blog, here are all of my photos of him. These are unedited and not cropped - just resized for posting. (I usually crop to just the good bits.) I'm also posting these in case Stan would rather use any of my other silk turret photos. I had not posted all of them. Perhaps I can get some publishing advice from him as well! I have a partially-written basics book on tarantulas. I could use some inspiration there, too, but have another project I need to finish first.

Without further ado, here are my Tears photos:

This is the photo used to create our header above.

We hope you've enjoyed Tears even partially as much as we did. We miss him. He was fascinating! His final hide was a deep tunnel running all the way along the bottom of his enclose so we could peek up at him from underneath. Hopefully our luck (regarding sex of tarantulas) will change soon!